


Fade Into You

by randomizer



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Femslash, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-03-09 08:29:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 43
Words: 160,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13477617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomizer/pseuds/randomizer
Summary: Donna and Cameron slowly find each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If slow burns annoy you, I advise you to avoid this fic--you're going to be REALLY annoyed!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna and Cameron discuss an idea.

Cameron is leaning against her truck, squinting at her map, when she hears Donna’s voice.

“Cameron.”

Something about Donna’s tone makes Cam’s breath catch just a little, even before she looks up. And when she does, she sees that Donna looks . . . different. Different from how she had looked mere moments ago in the diner. Certainly different from how she had looked this past year, or four years ago at the browser meetings, or even back in their days working together at Mutiny. Cam feels a flash of some peculiar combination of apprehension and excitement. For whatever reason, she knows that something is about to happen.

“What is it?”

Donna moves toward her, eyes luminous. She hesitates for the briefest of moments and then leans into the open door. “I . . . I have an idea.”

Cam just looks, knowing what that _could_ mean but mentally bracing herself before she allows any of whatever has infected Donna to seep its way into her.

“I read an article a couple of weeks ago, about a guy in Germany who tried to get a patent for a digital juke box in the early eighties, back when CDs first came out.” Donna is speaking quickly, as though Cam is about to dematerialize at any moment and she has only seconds to get everything out. “He thought people could just dial in to a central server to listen to music, rather than owning any physical discs. The patent was rejected, because phone lines in Germany couldn’t handle the size of the audio files, and PCs weren’t even powerful enough then to play songs all the way through--it just wasn’t practical for a product. But now . . .”

Cam starts to see where Donna is going with this. “But now Pentiums can play back music without stalling out, and there are new audio formats that can compress those files to make them a lot smaller than they were originally. Of course, we don’t know how good those song files would actually sound . . . “

Donna interrupts her. “I think there are a few audio formats fighting it out now; the dust will probably start settling this year. I can look into it more, but from what I can tell the MP3 is really going to be a game changer for music. It’s supposed to sound great, and it also shrinks the file size down a ton. And I think we . . . I mean, the timing could be perfect, this time. We wouldn’t be too early, or too late. We could . . . what do you think?” Cam has never believed that people could actually glow, but Donna is glowing in front of her right now.

Realizing that, once again, she has been given permission to postpone the actual business of driving away from Donna, Cam closes the door to her truck and steps away from it. “I think we should go back into that diner and have another cup of coffee.”

Donna laughs. “Yeah. I think so, too.”

 

**§§§**

  
Three hours later, with six cups of coffee, two cokes, one burger (Cam’s), and one tuna melt (Donna’s) between the two of them, Cam is feeling as caffeinated and as giddy as Donna looks. She tries to rein in her growing enthusiasm, because she knows that there’s a much better chance that this thing will go south than that it will actually work out.

“It’s risky, electronic music. CDs are selling like crazy. Do we really think that people would rather subscribe to some sort of digital juke box than just buy them?” Cam rolls her eyes at herself inwardly. Since when did she become the practical business person of the two of them?

Donna leans in. “We can make it worth their while. If everything falls into place, users would have access to all kinds of music, music from everywhere. It would far outstrip any possible private collection.” Donna’s eyes are a little unfocused, seeing all the possibilities. Cam feels herself being swept away in spite of her attempts to remain rational.

“But the record labels . . . we’d need to negotiate the rights. That wouldn’t be easy. I think they’d probably be pretty glued to the idea of physical CDs.That’s how music has always been sold, after all.” Even as she says this, Cam imagines what a world of digital music would be like. It really could change everything.

“Sure, there are challenges, but that’s why we’d get my VC firm involved from the beginning. They have the clout to do the negotiations, and we could just concentrate on building a terrific user experience.” Donna seems to have thought this through in a remarkably short time.

“You just . . . figured this all out while you were paying the check?” Cam is shaking her head, looking at Donna with a half-grin. “I should have let you buy me breakfast a long time ago. Imagine what might have happened if I’d ordered French toast instead of eggs.”

Donna is too caught up in the moment to smile back. “It was . . . I saw someone putting a quarter into the juke box over there, and it just all hit me at once. I think . . . I think this is what I’m supposed to do, and I’m supposed to be doing it with you. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it seems to me right now.”

Cam looks at her, suddenly longing to have this really be happening. “I want to work with you again. I mean . . . I _really_ want that. But are you sure? What about how we’re supposed to try being friends for awhile?”

Donna shrugs. “Eh.”

This time both of them burst out into paroxysms of laughter.

Donna is the first to get control of herself. “Did you know that I was a music major before I transferred to comp sci?I’m not sure I ever told you that. Music’s always been really important to me. That was actually the whole purpose of the Symphonic; it was supposed to be the computer that could really expand musical education. We believed in it, and that’s why it hurt so much when it failed. But this thing . . .”

Cam finishes the thought. “This thing could be great. It really _could_ change music.” She thinks about how important music has always been to her too, especially when she needed anything she could find to escape from her family.For awhile, music was the only thing that did that for her, at least until she learned how to code. And after that, it was music and coding together that transported her into a new world, one in which everything made sense, where she finally had a language, and where she could turn each confusingly intense emotion she had into something that seemed controlled and useful and right.

Cameron surveys the empty cups and plates in front of them. All she wants right now is to forget about this whole trip, to go back with Donna and just talk and talk with her forever, to start building this new thing—this new _life_ —with her. But before she can even savor the thought of that, she hears herself saying something else entirely.

“I still have to go.” Cam’s voice is low.

Donna looks at her, a little of her inward brightness visibly muting. “Oh. I guess . . . yes, I know. You already told your mother you were coming.”

Cam nods. “I just . . . I think I need to do that. I haven’t seen her since I was seventeen, and I . . .”

“Yeah.” Cam watches Donna trying not to sigh as she says that.

“But I’ll come back, as soon as I can.I just want to drive across the country, see a few things, finally face my mother. But then . . .”

“I know.And it’ll be fine.I can do some research while you’re gone, and then we can hit the ground running.” Cam sees a little worry creeping into Donna’s expression, despite her optimistic words. Cam feels anxious herself, even though she has every intention of doing exactly what she says. But will she really? Can she trust herself to come back to this thing that she wants so much that she won’t even let herself think about it? Leaving Donna right now can’t help but put all of it into jeopardy.

“Donna . . . it’s going to be ok this time.” Cam is reassuring herself as much as she is Donna, and it works a little on both of them. Donna reaches out and touches Cam’s hand, and Cam closes her eyes for a brief moment.

“Just come back when you’re ready, and I’ll be ready too.” Donna smiles as she says this, and Cam, finding herself unable to speak, just nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here we go! This is going to be a LONG fic. I'm writing it because I want to read it; I hope there are others who want to come along for the ride, but if not, I'm in it for the long haul anyway. Here are a couple of things you should know:
> 
> * As you can already see, there's going to be an underlying tech story about the rise of the MP3 file format in this fic, although the primary focus will be on Donna and Cameron. (The thing here about Donna being a former music major and the Symphonic being a music computer is actually sort of canon--it's in the shooting scripts, although it never made it to the show itself.) If you want to learn more about the MP3 revolution, check out Stephen Witt's fascinating HOW MUSIC GOT FREE.
> 
> * This fic will start in December 1994 and end in December 2001 (the reasons for that end date will eventually become obvious)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna makes a grand gesture.

Donna is half convinced that an earthquake will occur right before Cameron puts her F-150 into gear, that the universe has not finished its admonitions that Cam is meant to stay in California. But, perhaps placated at the promise of their business venture, the universe finally relents and permits Cam to drive away, her Airstream becoming a smaller and smaller metallic speck glinting in the sunshine. Donna tries to ignore the gut heaviness as she watches her go, the fear (ridiculous, she is sure, she hopes) that Cameron may never actually come back at all.

In the days that follow, Donna wills herself not to think too much about Cameron, about where she is, what she might be doing, how she might be feeling. Instead, she focuses on managing Symphonic Ventures as efficiently as possible, allowing herself an hour or so each day to learn as much as she can about the different potential audio file formats. It will be important to build the new company around the right one, and at the moment, it’s just not clear who the winners and losers are going to be.

Donna is doing such a good job not thinking about Cameron, in fact, that she is startled to hear Cam’s voice in her ear after she answers her ringing telephone late one night.

“Guess where I just was?” Cam sounds almost playful.

Donna gathers herself, ignoring the odd lurch of her heart. “Winnipeg?”

Cam laughs. “Pretty sure that’s not on the way to Florida. Nope, the first Mutiny building. I’m in Dallas.”

“Dallas? You’ve already seen Dallas. Shouldn’t you be seeing new things?” Even as she says it, Donna feels a pang of nostalgia so sharp that it’s almost a physical ache: she is picturing that Mutiny house, wishing that she were there with Cam. It was where the two of them began, and seeing it again right now, before this potential rebirth, seems exactly right.

“Oh, I am.New Mexico was actually pretty amazing. I went on a tour of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. You would have liked it.”

Donna tries and fail to picture Cam in a museum. “Yeah, I think I would have.”

They both grow silent, a little awkward in their simultaneous closeness and distance. Donna is the first to speak after the pause. “So . . . what’s next?”

Donna can almost see Cam’s fidgeting. “I think I’m just going to drive straight to Florida. I’ve kind of lost interest in sight-seeing. I just want to spend a couple of days with my mom and then head back . . . home.” Cam’s little hesitation before that final word wraps itself deep into Donna’s heart. She closes her eyes, glad that Cam can’t see her right now. Her relief that Cam actually, really, truly plans to come back, that Phoenix is really going to happen, brings tears to her eyes. She wipes them away impatiently. Since when has she become someone who cries at every little thing?

“So I guess you’ll be at your mom’s for Christmas, right?” Donna is sentimental about the holidays, and she likes the idea of Cam’s making peace with her family then.

Cam groans. “Yeah, I hadn’t even realized that when I planned this trip. It’s going to make it worse. I hate the fuck out of Christmas.”

Donna doesn’t know how to respond to that. “Cam . . . she’s really going to be glad to see you. It’s good that you’re doing this.” Nothing, Donna thinks, would be worse than losing Joanie or Haley for so many years.

“Maybe.” Cam sounds doubtful. “Anyway, look—I’d better get out of this diner and take off. I just wanted to check in and make sure that you were still alive.”

Donna wishes she could transport herself to whatever greasy spoon Cameron is calling from, just to assure herself that Cam still exists, too. “Do that more, can you? And take care of yourself. I want you back in one piece.”

“I will.” They both fall silent for another moment. “So, have a good Christmas, huh? It’ll just be you and Haley?”

“Yeah, Joanie’s still in Thailand, and my parents are on a cruise. I guess Haley and I will go to Diane and Bos’s for the day.It’ll be fine.” It won’t really be, Donna thinks. It’s probably going to be a sad Christmas, the first one without Gordon. But she and Haley will do the best that they can.

“And at least there’s a bright side—it’ll be over soon, and then we can get to work.” Cam seems to perk up a little at the prospect, and any sign that Cameron is genuinely enthusiastic about Phoenix makes Donna happy.

“Ok, Scrooge. Go hit the road, and I’ll talk to you soon.” Donna wishes that there were a casual, offhand way to give Cam just the smallest possible glimpse of the choking rush of fondness toward her that she’s feeling right now. Since there isn’t, she settles on just the “casual” part.

“I will. See you soon.” And then with a click, Cam vanishes from her life once again.

 

**§§§**

Exactly ten days before Christmas, Donna’s phone rings again. This time, it’s Joanie.

“Mom? I want you to listen to what I’m about to say and not say no until you really think about it.” Joanie’s voice is calm, adult-like, and Donna instinctively braces herself for whatever horror she is about to hear. Given Joanie, nothing would surprise her anymore.

Donna nods, forgetting for a moment that Joanie can’t see her. “Ok, go ahead. And by the way, it’s wonderful to hear from you.” And it is. No matter what is about to happen, just hearing Joanie’s voice, a genuine connection from so far away, is a delight.

“So, listen . . . I know that you’re disappointed that I’m not making it back for the holidays. There’s just so much to do here, and it didn’t reallymake sense . . .”

Donna interrupts her. “It’s fine, Joanie, really. I get it. I’m glad you’re having such a great time, and Christmas is really just another day.” Donna doesn’t really think this, of course, and she knows that Joanie realizes that she doesn’t, but it’s the right thing to say at the moment.

“That’s good,” Joanie is clearly making a conscious choice to believe that Donna means what she says. “But what would you say if I . . . what do you think about my inviting Haley to come here for the holidays?” Joanie pauses, waiting for the explosion.

Donna is too stunned to answer for a moment. “Joanie, Christmas is . . . it’s in less than a week and a half. How could that possibly even happen?” Donna feels as though her heart is breaking into pieces at the thought of it, but she clings to the pragmatics.

“It wouldn’t be that hard. Haley has a passport, and I’d buy her the ticket as a present. It would be expensive, this late, but I have the money, and I really want to see her. I think it would be good for her to get away, to have a different kind of Christmas this year.” Joanie’s voice chokes a little, and Donna wishes that she could hold her the way she had when Joanie was a child.

Donna thinks about how sad Haley has been, about how close her two girls are, and about the fact that the Christmas she has planned would only make Haley feel worse. Haley, she knows, would love to see Joanie and have adventures with her halfway around the world. “I guess . . . I think you’re right. If Haley wants to go, it’s ok with me.” Being a grownup really sucks sometimes, Donna thinks to herself.

Joanie clearly had not expected her mother to give in, or at least, not this quickly. “Are you sure you’ll be ok? You’ll spend Christmas with Bos and Diane?”

“I’m sure. It’ll be fine. I have a lot of work to do, anyway. If Cam and I are going to concentrate on this new business idea next year, every minute counts. I can really use the time alone.” That’s all true, Donna thinks, even though the idea of the holidays without either of her daughters seems unbearable.

“Ok.” Joanie suddenly sounds doubtful. “If you’re really all right with it, I’ll talk to Haley.”

“I’m really all right with it. She’s going to be thrilled, Joanie. Thanks for doing this for her. I love you.” That, at least, is a hundred percent true.

“Love you, too. I gotta jet before this calling card runs out. I’ll call you on Christmas!”

 

**§§§**

That night, as Donna lies in bed, pouring over articles in trade journals about the relative benefits and weaknesses of MP2, MP3, and MPEG audio files, she hears a knock on her door.

“Come on in,” she calls out to Haley.

Haley enters and sits on the corner of the bed. “Joanie said that she talked to you.”

“She did. What do you think?” Donna knows the answer before Haley says anything.

“Will you really be ok? It’s the first Christmas since Dad—“ Haley looks worried, and Donna’s heart fills with love for her.

“I’ll be fine. But listen to me—you get to do exactly what you want to do, this Christmas, maybe more than any other Christmas. This is when you get to think about yourself, and not worry about me. If you want to see your sister, and see a little bit of the world, that’s precisely what you should be doing. We’ll have plenty of other Christmases, but this one should be yours and Joanie’s.” Donna is pretty proud of that speech, and she mostly even believes it.

Haley looks as though she’s about to start crying. “I want to go.”

“That’s great. I think you should.” Donna smiles at Haley, willing her own voice to remain steady.

“Thanks, Mom.” Haley throws herself into Donna’s arms, and they embrace each other tightly without saying anything more.  
****

**§§§**

On the morning of December 21, two days after taking Haley to the airport and heroically managing not to sob until her daughter was safely boarded, Donna is working from her home office when she hears her phone ring once again.

“Hello?”

“Hey.” It’s Cam, and Donna instantly knows that something isn’t right.

“Cam? Are you ok? Where are you?”

“Tallahassee.” Cam’s voice is a little muffled, and there are restaurant sounds in the background.

Donna starts to put it together. “Have you seen your mom yet? Or are you about to?”

“I saw her last night.” Cam’s voice has no real expression in it, at least not any that Donna can detect.

“And?” Donna wonders just how bad this was.

“It didn’t go that well.” Now Cam has a little bit of a something in her voice, but Donna can’t decide if it’s regret, or anger, or some combination of the two.

“Oh, Cam.” Donna wishes that she were in that restaurant, wishes that she weren’t a useless blob of goo three thousand miles away.

“It wasn’t horrible, or anything like that. I mean, we didn’t fight. But she’s just so disappointed in me. I’m totally not what she wanted or what she expected I’d turn into.” Sadness, definitely, winning out over anger. Donna feels helpless.

“That’s ridiculous. How could she possibly be disappointed in you? I mean, how many people get to have coding geniuses for daughters?” A wave of protectiveness assails Donna, and she feels as though she’s catching some of the anger that has just left Cameron. What kind of mother wouldn’t see how remarkable Cam is?

Cam laughs, a genuine enough laugh that Donna is relieved at the sound of it. “Pretty sure she’d rather have a daughter who works as a preschool teacher and marries the boy next door. I don’t think she even knows what it exactly is that I do.” Donna feels a flash of empathy, thinking how it must have been for someone like Cam to grow up in a conventional Texas household, with nobody to understand or appreciate her. _I wish I knew her then_.

“Are you staying with them?” Donna tries to shift the conversation to more neutral territory.

“Nope. That’s the one good thing. She and Len—that’s my stepfather—don’t really have a guest room, and Len’s daughter and son-in-law are already staying with them for the holidays. So I’m in the Airstream. I found a trailer park on Currier Street, about ten miles from their house, and they’re letting me pay by the week. It’s right next to a Denny’s, so I’m ok for food.” Donna thinks that it all sounds incredibly depressing, but she keeps the thought to herself.

“When will you be seeing them again?”

“Well, tomorrow, and then for dinner the next night. But they’re all going to Len’s sister’s for the whole day on Christmas Eve, so I’ll be able to hang out in the Airstream then. Then Christmas Day, which should be all kinds of awful—Len’sdaughter just hates me. Have I told you how much I despise the holidays?” Cam sounds a little more lively, ghoulishly relishing describing how terrible it was going to be.

Donna can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, you mentioned that.”

“Well, at least my mother seems to be sober now. And that’s a lot.” Cam rarely talks about her past, and Donna has never pressed.

“Cam . . . are you going to be ok?” Donna can’t think of anything else to ask, and she knows the real answer no matter how Cam chooses to respond.

“Sure.” Cam, in point of fact, sounds very unsure. “I just have a couple of days, and then Christmas, and then I’ll be double-timing it back to California. That’s nothing.”

“Yeah.” Donna says it absently, because a crazy idea is forming. She jots “Currier Street” down on her notepad before it can slip out of her mind.

 

**§§§**

When the idea doesn’t go away the next morning, Donna decides to ask her assistant if it is even feasible.

“So, hypothetically—could you get me on a plane to Tallahassee Regional Airport tomorrow, and rent me a car?”

“Tomorrow? As in, the day before Christmas Eve?” Ashley has learned to make every request look as though it were a mere trifle, but this one catches her off guard.

“Could you just look into it as soon as possible, and let me know what you find out?” Donna is glad that being the managing partner of Symphonic Ventures means that she doesn’t have to answer a lot of potentially awkward questions about just where the hell she might be going, and why the hell she might be going there.

Ashley pops her head into Donna’s office ten minutes later. “There’s a flight that’ll get you into Tallahassee around midnight, but there’s only a middle seat in coach left on it. There’s no problem with the rental car. Should I book it?”

Donna hears herself saying yes before her brain can even process the question. “Can you also book me a hotel room at the airport for that night? Oh, and find me a motel in the city for a couple of days after that?”

Donna shakes her head at herself, a little stunned at what appears to be happening.

 

**§§§**

That night, Donna rings the doorbell at Diane and Bos’s house. She has already left a message for Diane that she’ll be going to Tallahassee for Christmas, and she wants to give them their present before she heads out tomorrow.

The house looks predictably lovely, with tasteful Christmas decorations in just the right numbers and places. Donna hears background laughter when Bos answers the door, and she realizes that both of Diane’s daughters are home for the holidays.

“Hey, now.” Bos takes the box from Donna and places it under the Christmas tree. “Sorry we won’t be seeing you for Christmas.” But he’s grinning at her, and Donna can tell that she’s pleased him.

“Yeah.” Donna looks at Bos and smiles. If anyone were going to understand this madcap quest, it would be Bos.

Bos taps Donna on the shoulder. “Say hey to Cam for me when you see her. Bring her back to us.”

“That’s the plan.” Nonchalant, but she sees that she isn’t fooling Bos, who smiles at her again, shaking his head. Donna wonders, as she often has before, just why it is that Bos, more than anyone else in the world, is the one who seems to _get_ Cameron. She also wonders at the completely irrational flash of jealousy she feels at the thought.

At that moment, Diane comes in. “John, can you excuse us for a moment? I’d like to talk to Donna.”Donna feels a flutter of anxiety at Diane’s unusually grave expression.

Diane doesn’t leave her to wonder long. “Donna, have you . . . is this something that you really want to be doing?”

“What? Going to Tallahassee?” Donna is starting to feel defensive.

“The whole thing. Getting so . . . involved with Cameron again.” Forthrightness is, after all, what Diane does best. Donna often admires her for it, but not precisely at this moment.

“You said that the digital jukebox was a good idea.” Donna knows that the business plan isn’t really the point of what Diane is saying, but she clings to it nevertheless.

“It _is_ a good idea. But with the history that you and Cameron have, are you sure that you want to risk putting yourself through that again?”

The words are not unkind, but they hit Donna hard nonetheless. Then something deep and difficult to pin down shifts inside her. “Yes. I do. I actually want this more than anything right now.” She hesitates. “I _need_ this.”

Diane softens just a little. “All right. Maybe you do. But are you sure that you want to show up on her doorstep on Christmas Eve? It’s kind of a grand gesture, don’t you think? It’s the sort of thing people do at the ends of those awful Hallmark Christmas movies.Do you want to do _that_? Why not just wait for Cam to come back to California?”

Donna bites her lip.She knows that she hasn’t really thought this through. She doesn’t know what Cam will think, and she doesn’t know what it all actually means. What she does know is that she wants— _needs_ —to see Cam, and she thinks— _hopes_ —that Cam wants to see her just as much. But when it gets down to it, it’s yet another leap off yet another cliff. “I don’t know. I just think Tallahassee is where I need to go, this Christmas. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s how I feel. I’m just . . . I’m trying to listen to my instincts more, these days.”

Diane shakes her head ruefully, putting her hand on Donna’s arm and giving it a squeeze. Just as she does, Diane’s older daughter Kimberly pokes her head into the room. “Hey, Donna!”

Diane excuses herself to check on dinner, and Donna smiles at Kimberly. They’ve had a bond since they first met on that weekend at Diane’s vineyard, so long ago now. “How are you feeling?”

“Pregnant and miserable, but I guess there’s an end date in sight.” Donna looks at her, deciding not to say that it would probably get worse before it got better.

“Hey . . .” Kimberly looks suddenly conspiratorial.“I have something for you.”

“What?” Donna panics for a moment. She didn’t get either of Diane’s daughters a present, never gave it a thought.Damn Christmas. Cam might have the right idea about the holidays, after all.

Kimberly clocks to Donna’s apprehension. “No, it’s not an official Christmas present, or anything like that. Well, here.” She stuffs a little plastic package into Donna’s hands. “I can’t use these, because, you know, _pregnant_. I thought maybe you might find something to do with them.”

Donna looks down and realizes that Kimberly has given her some weed. “Oh, no . . . thanks, but I don’t think . . .”

“Never turn down great weed around the holidays.I guarantee you that you’ll find a use for these joints.” Kimberly looks at the package wistfully.

Donna shrugs, pocketing it. Everything in her life is inverting at the moment, and this weed, after all, is just one more thing.And who knows? Kimberly might be right.

 

**§§§**

The plane is packed with holiday travelers, and it’s been a long time since Donna has flown in anything less than business class; she can’t actually remember ever being stuck in a middle coach seat between two teenagers (a brother and sister, she gathers eventually, flying to Florida to visit their grandparents). At least they aren’t interested in talking to her, which gives Donna the opportunity to try to read her _Tourist’s Guide to Florida_ (she mostly fails) and to sleep (she always fails).But somehow the hours pass, and the plane is landing.

It’s after midnight when she exits the airport, the air warmer and more humid than it is back home despite the lateness of the hour.A quick shuttle ride later and she’s checking into the airport’s Hilton. Donna knows that she should be exhausted after the cross-country flight and the days of anxiety that preceded it, but she’s fairly certain that she won’t be sleeping much tonight, even so. She changes into a night shirt anyway and closes her eyes.All she can see behind her lids is Cameron. What on earth is Cam going to make of this?Maybe she misread Cam’s tone in their last phone conversation; maybe she isn’t sad and lonely after all.And even if she is, she might not want Donna’s company.More than anything else, Cam is a loner, and Donna probably should respect that. If she pushes too hard, if she shows Cam just how damn much this all means to her, she might lose her forever. Donna eventually manages to doze and escape her thoughts until just before sunrise, when they start all over again.

 

**§§§**

Around 7:30, Donna picks up her little rental Volkswagen Golf, buys a map of Tallahassee, and quickly locates Currier Street on it. Luckily, it doesn’t seem to be a very long street, so she’s pretty sure she’ll be able to find a trailer park on it.And as it turns out, after an easy forty minute drive, she finds the road and sees a sign labeled “Jennings Trailer Homes” as soon as she makes the right-hand turn.

It appears to be a good-sized trailer park (not that Donna has seen many others), and Donna drives around it slowly. She sees several Airstreams, but none of them is Cameron’s. Finally, turning down the last row and almost ready to give up, she sees it: Cam’s truck, one of her lawn chairs, and an Airstream that is definitely hers. 

Now that she’s mere yards away from her destination, Donna parks the car and just sits for a moment, glancing at her watch.It’s only 8:30, still early, much earlier than Cam usually gets up.Donna is uncertain. Should she wait until 10:00 or so before knocking? Should she sit here until Cam comes out of the Airstream on her own? Or should she just head back to the airport, buy a ticket back to California, and forget the whole thing? Maybe Diane was right; maybe this is a terrible idea. Donna suddenly remembers how it felt to drive up to Cameron’s Airstream to get her to sign off on the Rover algorithm, how she simultaneously longed to see Cam and dreaded having to ask her for something. This is different, of course—they’re long past that, they’ve forgiven each other, they’re friends. But still, for some reason echoes of that terror and heartache remain.

Unbuckling her seatbelt, Donna pushes those demons aside, making up her mind as suddenly and completely as she had when she had run to Cam with her idea at the diner several weeks ago.Before she fully realizes what she’s doing, she’s slamming the car door, walking up to the Airstream, and knocking on the door with good, solid, confident thwaps.

And then it’s Cam staring down at Donna, sleepy eyes wide and jaw slack. And it’s Cam blinking, opening her mouth, closing it again without speaking.

And then, to Donna’s astonishment, it’s Cam hugging her tightly (has Cam ever done that? Donna doesn’t think so), and everything grey and uncertain in Donna’s world slides back into place, clear and bright and in technicolor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hallmark movies for the win!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna and Cameron have unexpected adventures.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, I know that this chapter borders on crack. I REGRET NOTHING! And you've heard of [Chekhov's gun?](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChekhovsGun) Spoiler alert: Chekhov's weed is a thing, too!

Lying in bed, Cam is trying to decide whether dinner with her mother tonight had been an improvement on their earlier encounters. It was a little less awkward, certainly, the constant, grating nervous chatter not as much in evidence. But on the other hand, her mother’s clear bewilderment at the person her daughter has become was even more obvious.

_Catherine, can you believe that Jesse Donahue’s family moved here too?They live only a few blocks away, just the way they used to in Dallas. Jesse is in town for the holidays. You remember Jesse, don’t you? He was such a handsome boy. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you again._

Cameron does indeed remember Jesse Donahue, the jerk who had routinely tormented just about anyone in middle school who wasn’t a popular jock. She also remembers the dopey, surprised look on his face the day she kicked his ass for stealing and destroying a box of floppy backups from one of the kids in computer club. It’s one of her few pleasant memories from eighth grade.

_You really ought to try the new hair salon downtown while you’re here—Sophie would probably squeeze you in before Christmas, as a favor to me. There are so many stylish cuts that would really suit your face._

Somehow, in focusing on her mother’s drinking issues, Cameron had forgotten all this, forgotten how much (drunk or sober) her mother loved to poke and prod and remodel. Apparently the quest to relive Cam’s 1970 Little Miss Flawless pageant victory is alive and well, even through all their years of estrangement.

_We’re really thrilled to have you at Christmas dinner this year. If you don’t have a nice dress, we could go shopping together for something. I just don’t want you to feel uncomfortable or embarrassed in front of everyone._

Fucking Christmas.What was she doing here, anyway? Why had she ever thought that this was a good idea?

 

**§§§**

Hours later, having finally silenced the noises in her head and dropped off to sleep, Cameron is only fuzzily aware of the sharp rap on the door of her Airstream.When the rap insists on pulling her into semi-consciousness, she assumes that it must be the owner of the trailer park, coming to complain about some regulation that she was failing to follow. Grumblingly pulling on a pair of sweatpants, Cam glances at her t-shirt to make sure it has few enough holes to be seen by a stranger, gets out of bed, and opens the door. But what she sees there almost convinces her that she’s still asleep and dreaming.

Donna, hair pulled into a pony-tail, with anxious eyes, a casual sweater, and (ironed, she now knows) jeans, stands in front of her. Before Cam’s rational mind can assemble all the reasonable questions that it has the perfect right to formulate ( _What is she doing here? How did she get here? Is anything wrong?_ ), something deep within Cameron shoves logic aside for the moment. Without thinking about anything at all, Cam reaches out and pulls Donna into a hug. She has never been so happy to see her—to see anyone, maybe—in her life. Suddenly and completely, she feels more like herself than she’s felt for days. She’s Cameron again.

The hug only lasts a moment before Cam’s mind recovers and insists that it receive some answers. “Donna? What the hell are you doing here?” Perhaps as a result of the hours spent the day before with her mother, Cam speaks more sharply than she intends. She sees Donna flinch a little, and she could strangle herself.

Donna hesitates briefly. “I . . . thought maybe you could use some company.” She looks steadily at Cam as if to force her way into the distance between that initial impulsive hug and the bluntness of the question that followed it.

Cam looks away, unable to process that Donna has come all this way just because she thought that Cam _needed_ her to come. How could that even be possible? It’s Christmas, after all, and Christmas is a big deal to someone like Donna. Cam focuses on that, because considering the implications of the rest of it is too much at the moment. Nonetheless, she feels a sudden tightness in her chest and throat. “But what about Haley? She’s not here too, is she?”

Donna shakes her head. “Joanie sent Haley a last-minute invitation to spend the holidays in Thailand with her, and we all decided that she ought to go. So no, it’s just me.” Donna’s smile is a little thin and wan.

Cam looks at Donna, knowing exactly how difficult it must be for her to have both of her daughters away for Christmas, particularly this first Christmas after Gordon’s death. “How did you find me?”

“Wasn’t hard. You mentioned Currier Street, and I can read a map.” Cam isn’t fooled by the casualness of Donna’s tone; none of this could have been easy.The tightness in her throat returns, and she has to wait a moment for it to clear before she can speak.

“So you just . . . flew here? Just like that?” Cam still is having trouble believing any of this.

“Well, yeah—in a commercial plane, of course. I’m not Wonder Woman.” Donna’s mouth twitches.

“Wonder Woman has a plane. An invisible one.” Cam can’t help the correction.As Donna rolls her eyes, Cam’s lips form a half-grin. “You’re insane.You know that, right?”

“Probably.” Suddenly, both of them are smiling.

Cam has to clear her throat once again. “Well, if you’re expecting, I dunno, wreaths and mistletoe and a Christmas goose, you’re in for a real disappointment.”

“I’m not expecting that.” Cameron is a little startled at the open look of fondness on Donna’s face.

“Good.” Cam suppresses the urge to hug Donna harder and longer this time, just to make sure that she’s actually real. “Then step into my parlor.”

 

**§§§**

Cam sees Donna looking around the Airstream curiously, and she realizes that Donna has never seen the inside of it before now. Throwing a sweatshirt off the bench in the back so Donna would have a place to sit, Cam wishes that it were a little neater.

Before Cam can begin to feel weird—entertaining Donna in her trailer mere miles from her mother’s house is one of the last things Cameron ever thought she might be doing—Donna breaks the silence. “So here’s the deal. We’re going to have fun today, and I’m in charge of everything. You just need to do exactly what I tell you to do, and then nobody gets hurt.” Donna has a mock-stern expression on her face, but somehow Cam knows that she actually means what she says.

“Always the project manager.” Cam feeling much lighter than she would have thought possible twenty-four hours ago. “What’s first on your agenda?”

“Breakfast. I’m starving. Where is this Denny’s of yours?”

 

**§§§**

One hour later, Cam is digging into her usual Denny’s Lumberjack Slam, watching Donna finish up the remains of a veggie omelet. She is feeling content, wondering a little about what Donna might have planned before consciously deciding not to give it any more thought at all.Not thinking, she finds, is extremely pleasant.

“So, about today,” Donna says, smiling an amused, mysterious smile. “All I can tell you is that you’re lucky that you hate Christmas so much, because this is going to be the anti-Christmas Eve day. While everyone else is running around doing their last-minute Christmas shopping, we’re going to be doing the exact opposite.”

“The exact opposite? You mean we’re going to be _selling_ Christmas presents?” Cam is enjoying being difficult.Truth be told, she’s simply enjoying _enjoying_.

“Shut up.” Cam can see that Donna is liking this, too. How long has it been since they’ve had fun with each other? Did they ever?

“Ok, I’m in. Anything would be a better day than what I had planned, which basically consisted of lying in bed counting the minutes left until I could head for the California hills.” Cam’s tone is joking, but she’s telling Donna the absolute truth.

Donna pushes her plate to the side, glancing at her watch. “We have a couple of hours to kill right now, so we’d better get going.”

Cam grins at her. Donna is both the literal (they’re traveling around in her rental car) and metaphorical driver of this odyssey, and Cam plans to allow herself to be project managed completely.

 

**§§§**

About twenty minutes later (Cam marvels at how deft Donna is at reading a map and maneuvering around a strange city), they pull up to the parking lot in front of something called “Flipper Fun.”

“Some kind of dolphin aquarium?” Cam cocks her head at Donna, not sure what this place could be about.

“You’ll see.” Donna looks smug and confident. “The ‘Fun Activities in Tallahassee’ section of my _Tourist’s Guide to Florida_ recommended it highly.”

The two of them walk in, and Cam’s mouth hangs open at what she sees. Rows and rows of old pinball machines, glowing and blinking colorfully. No video games at all, just these games from another time, resurrected. Cam suddenly remembers being seven years old and the weekly routine of going to a similar place with her father, before he left for Vietnam.

Cam looks over to see Donna looking at her closely. Cam blinks and swallows before saying anything. “It’s beautiful.”

Donna smiles. “Yeah. I think so, too.” They both look at the machines for a moment, admiring them in silent camaraderie.

“We need quarters,” Donna says, seeing a Flipper Fun worker set up at a change-making kiosk in the center of the rows of pinball machines. “I’ll be right back.” She dashes off, leaving Cam to watch her bemusedly.

When Donna returns, she presses a stack of quarters into Cam’s hand, keeping another stack for herself. “Gordon told me about your trick quarter for arcades,” she says, shaking her head a little. “But I think we’ll play it safe and legal this time.”

Cam laughs, remembering those days that seem so far away right now.The two of them choose adjoining pinball machines and start playing, separately but companionably.Cam occasionally steals a glance at Donna, who is so focused on playing that she doesn’t notice. Donna, of course, is as good at pinball as she is at everything else.

Both of them finish their first game at around the same time. “Death match?” Cam asks. “Let’s see who can keep it going longer. Loser buys the winner a hot dog.”

“You’re on.” Donna narrows her eyes, concentrating. They put their quarters in at the same time. It’s close, but Donna loses her third ball just before Cam does.

“Hah! You owe me one hot dog—with mustard _and_ relish.” Cam feels foolishly triumphant as Donna rolls her eyes.

“Go start another game.I’ll be right back with the hot dogs.” Donna leaves to go join the line at the snack bar. Cam is deep into Black Knight 2000 when Donna returns with hot dogs and sodas for both of them.

After pausing to eat and then playing a couple more games each, Donna looks at her watch. “Yikes! We have only a half hour to get to the next stop on the itinerary. Ready to go?”

Cam shrugs. “Lead the way.” It’ll be hard for Donna to top the pinball arcade, she thinks, but she can’t wait to see what she has planned.

 

 **§§§  
**   
They pull up in front of a seedy-looking building with no sign at all. “Trying to get us murdered?” Cam asks Donna. She’s more than a little puzzled at where they could be.

Donna looks at her. “Ok, well, this place wasn’t in the _Tourist’s Guide to Florida._ I actually found it on a newsgroup called alt.florida.underground.”

Cam is intrigued. “What are you getting me into, Donna Emerson? And is it legal?”

Donna smiles. “Sort of.Well, not entirely. So, I figured we needed some nod to Christmas, even for a Christmas Grinch like you. We’re about to see a double-feature of two of the very best Christmas movies that Hollywood has to offer.”

Cam groans. “You’re not making me sit through _It’s a Wonderful Life_ and _Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street_ , are you? Because there’s a limit to my good nature.”

“I think we roared past that limit quite some time ago,” Donna nudges Cam’s shoulder as she says this, and Cam feels unexpectedly warm at the touch. “No, we’re about to see _Santa Claus Conquers the Martians_ , which is widely considered one of the very worst movies ever made, and the _Star Wars Holiday Special_ , which is so terrible that it was only shown once on TV in 1978 and is only available as a bootleg. We’re lucky to find a place where we can see it in a theater.”

Cam is amazed; she’s forgotten how much Donna can surprise her sometimes. “You’ve got to be kidding. That sounds . . . incredible.”

“Yeah, I think so, too. Come on. We have just enough time to get some popcorn.”

 

**§§§**

Cam can’t remember ever having seen such terrible movies, or enjoying herself in a movie theater so much. It was even worth sitting through the endless minutes of sub-titled Wookie, she thinks.

It’s after 3:00 when the movies are over, and Cam can’t wait to find out if Donna has anything else planned for their crazy non-Christmas Christmas Eve.She doesn’t have to wonder long.

“Ok, one more stop before we call it quits on the organized activity part of the day.” The two of them get into the little VW Golf, which Donna steers toward Monroe Street. In a matter of minutes, they’re arriving at a place called “Sky High.”

“I think a little exercise is in order, don’t you?” Donna has a half-smile on her face, which Cam finds oddly endearing.

“Just what sort of . . . exercise?” Cam is a little suspicious. “We’re not going sky diving, are we?”

They enter the building together. If Cam had thought that she was done being surprised by Donna, she would have been wrong.They’re in a trampoline park. It’s mostly empty, she notes, probably because all the non-insane people in Tallahassee are getting ready for Christmas Eve. Gaping, Cam can’t think of anything to say. She turns to Donna, who has already scurried away to buy tickets.

“So, there seem to be different things to do on each trampoline. Some are just plain, some of them have Nerf basketballs and hoops, and others have these soft, foamy things that you can land on. Which do you want to try first?” Donna looks expectant, as though the two of them jumping on a trampoline together is a perfectly normal thing to be doing.

Cam shakes her head, wondering just when exactly it was that Donna lost her mind. “Um . . . I guess the hoops?” She might as well give herself over to it, she thinks.

Donna and Cameron both take off their shoes and climb onto the trampoline, which they have all to themselves. Donna starts to jump a little tentatively.

“Come on, Donna. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to _do_ it.” Cam starts to jump harder, bouncing up and down as if she were flying. Dammit, this is actually _fun_. She grabs a Nerf ball and lobs it at a basket as she bounces toward it.As she makes it, she hears Donna cheer.

Now, following Cam’s lead, Donna is bouncing higher, throwing balls at Cameron, who ducks and grabs one to throw back at Donna. A wild Nerf fight ensues.

“This . . . isn’t . . . basketball,” Cam hears Donna gasp as she lobs the final Nerf ball at Cam.

“Nope.But it’s pretty cool, anyway,” Cam snatches another ball, this time tossing it into the basket again. When she makes it, she feels like a superstar.Donna throws a ball Cam’s way, this time more as a pass than as enemy fire.

When the two of them are breathing so hard (and laughing so much) that they have to stop, they sit on a bench together and look at the nearly empty building. “They’re going to be closing in about fifteen minutes, so we might as well head out.” Donna looks a little sad, and Cam feels it too. This day, this wonderful, crazy day, has an expiration date, and apparently they’ve reached it.

“So . . . we could grab an early dinner. I have a motel room lined up, and I can check in after that.” Donna sounds suddenly a little embarrassed and uncertain, as if the logistical details of after-the-fun-and-games were something that she hasn’t really thought through yet.

Cam jerks her head up. “Motel room? What do you mean? You’re not staying with me in the Airstream?”

Donna bites her lip, and, flushing, Cam realizes what she might be thinking about. “There are two beds—I mean, the table folds into another bed.It’s kind of neat, and it’s totally comfortable.” Cam actually doesn’t know how comfortable or uncomfortable it might be, since she’s never tried it herself. But she’s suddenly desperate to keep Donna from leaving.

“I . . . if you’re sure. I didn’t mean to . . . I thought it would be easier for you if I just . . .” Cam can see—or she _thinks_ she can see—that Donna doesn’t want their day to end so abruptly, either.

“Of course I’m sure. It’s Christmas Eve, right?We can even sing a carol, as long as it’s something written after 1970.” Cam is pleased when she sees Donna smirk.

 

**§§§**

Rather than trying to search for a restaurant that might still be open, they decide to stop at a 7-11 and buy junk food to eat for dinner in the Airstream.

“We should each choose four things,” Donna is still in project management mode.

“Why four? Isn’t that a little arbitrary?” Cam finds this whole excursion extremely amusing.

“Four is the perfect number. That means we’ll have eight choices, so we’re sure to like _something_. It’s not too much, and it’s not too little.” Donna’s logic here is unassailable.

“Ok, Goldilocks.Will do.”Cam studies the shelves, ultimately deciding on a jumbo-sized box of frosted blueberry Pop-Tarts, a big bag of Doritos, some midgie Tootsie Rolls, and a can of Pringles.She sees Donna with a box of peanut butter pretzels, a package of Oreos, gummy bears, and a box of Better Cheddars.

“Do we need drinks?” Donna asks, balancing her haul delicately.

“I have lots of orange soda, so I don’t think so.Besides, wouldn’t drinks count against our four things?”

“Nope. Drinks don’t count.” Donna, the keeper and creator of the rules, says this definitively, as if it were a thing that should be self-evident to any reasonable person.

 

**§§§**

Back at the Airstream, Donna arranges the food in a neat row on the table. Cam watches her silently from the bed, suddenly tired. The few hours of sleep she had last night, coupled with all the adventures of this very strange day, are starting to catch up with her. She sees Donna looking at her and unsuccessfully tries to stifle a yawn.

“Yeah.Me, too,” Donna says. “I didn’t get much sleep last night in the airport hotel that I stayed at.My flight got in at midnight.” Cam sees that some of the adrenaline that had been fueling Donna throughout the day has indeed begun to ebb.

“Well, we can go to bed early.” It’s been dark for awhile now, Cam notes, glancing at her watch; it’s only 6:30, but it feels later. The lights in the trailer glow cozily. “I have some wine, but I know that you’re keeping away from that, so maybe . . .”

Donna gives her a look that’s some peculiar cross between devilish and abashed. She sits next to Cam on the bed and hands her a little package. Cam stares at it. “You brought _weed_?”

“Well, sort of.Yes, I brought it, but I hadn’t planned on it. Diane’s daughter Kimberly gave it to me when I went to give them their Christmas present.She’s pregnant, so she can’t . . . anyway, it’s here.” Donna takes the package from Cam, studying it.Then she takes one of the joints out, looking at Cam inquiringly.

Cam shrugs; why not end this bizarre day by getting stoned with Donna? She rummages around in the drawer of the little table next to her bed. “I think I have a lighter . . . yeah, here it is.” She hands the little Bic to Donna, who flicks it to light up. Donna inhales sharply, coughs a little, and hands the joint to Cam. Cam does the same, holding it for a moment before passing it back to Donna. They don’t say anything, both of them watching the flickering lights from the other trailers in the park.

Cam sits up. “How about some music?”

Donna shrugs.“Sure.That sounds good.What do you have?”

Cam grabs a CD at random, putting it into her boom box. “Here’s something that I got last year and haven’t even listened to yet.”The plaintive lyrics of [Mazzy Star's Fade Into You](http://www.heatherweb.com/stuff/fade/fade.mp3) begin to fill the Airstream, and Donna and Cam listen to it in silence.

 _I want to hold the hand inside you_  
_I want to take a breath that's true_  
_I look to you and I see nothing_  
_I look to you to see the truth_  
_You live your life, you go in shadows_  
_You'll come apart and you'll go blind_  
_Some kind of night into your darkness_  
_Colors your eyes with what's not there_  
_Fade into you_  
_Strange you never knew_  
_Fade into you  
_ _I think it's strange you never knew_

 “Kind of a different vibe from your usual punk, isn’t it?” Donna is smiling at Cam as she says it.

 “Yeah, well—I listen to more stuff now, but I still like punk. Anyway, this seemed to fit the mood.” For some reason, Cam finds herself really moved by this song, which surprises her. She might have broader musical tastes than she used to, but slow and mellow isn’t usually her jam.

 “It definitely does.” Neither of them speak as they listen to the whole CD quietly together.

 When the album ends, Donna suddenly starts to laugh, and Cam looks at her. “What?”

 “No, it’s just . . . if I could have seen myself here last Christmas Eve, I would have thought that I was crazy or hallucinating. I never would have thought that I . . . that we . . .” Donna cracks up again, taking another long drag on the joint before handing it over to Cam.

 Cam considers this. “Yeah, I know. I can’t even remember what I did last Christmas, but it wasn’t this, that’s for sure.” The two of them both start laughing at the same time.

 Donna sobers suddenly, glancing over at Cam. “I’m so . . . glad that we’re doing this thing, Phoenix. We’re going to get to do it over again, do it better this time. It’s just . . . it’s everything.” Donna suddenly seems to realize that she might have said a little too much and avoids Cam’s eyes as she finishes.

 Cam is conscious of a warmth that she knows must be at least fifty percent weed, but she basks in it nonetheless. “Me, too. Nothing’s really been right for me since Mutiny.” She realizes how true this is as she says it. Mutiny had been life, and everything after Mutiny had been something other than life.

 Donna nods. “Me, either. I just . . . do you know how they say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone?That was it for me.”

 “Yeah. Exactly.” They sit together in silence, passing the joint back and forth companionably.

 Cam suddenly realizes that her stomach is rumbling. “Do you want a Pop Tart?”

 Donna smiles. “I do.” Cam hops off the bed, grabs the box of Pop Tarts and the bag of Doritos for good measure. She settles back next to Donna, opens the box, rips open a Pop Tart pouch, and hands one over.They both inhale them, laughing together at nothing at all.

“Cam . . . why do you hate Christmas so much?” Donna is fumbling with the bag of Doritos, not looking at Cam as she asks this question. Cam hesitates a moment before responding.

“It’s . . . well, my dad used to love it. I mean, he _really_ loved it—decorations and surprises and the food and the presents, everything. And once he wasn’t there, it just didn’t seem as though there was any point to it anymore.” Cam is silent, remembering that first Christmas without her father, how messed up her mother was, and how looking at other people having fun was like looking at something she used to love through a distorted fun-house mirror. It seemed far better to skip Christmas entirely than to have to see it like that.

Donna doesn’t say anything, but she takes Cam’s hand and squeezes it gently. Cam holds on for a moment, more grateful for the touch than she could ever say.

Donna snuffs out the remains of the joint and leans back, and Cam does the same. She is suddenly very, very tired. “Donna . . . you’re coming tomorrow to my mother’s for Christmas, right?” Cam has no idea how her mother will react to that, but she doesn’t care: if Donna is willing to come, she wants her there.

“If it’s ok, sure I will.I’d like to meet her.” Donna’s voice is neutral, but Cam can tell that she’s ready to go to battle.The thought of that, of having Donna fully and completely on her side, fills Cam with another shot of warmth.

“It’ll be ok.I mean, she’s serving ham, I think.Ham lasts forever and serves a million people, doesn’t it?” The two of them start laughing again, as though the idea of an everlasting ham is the funniest thing that either of them has ever heard.

There’s one more thing that Cam has to say before she passes out completely. “Hey. Thanks for coming. I don’t know what made you think of it, but I’m so glad you did. Today was . . . great.” And it was.It was pretty much a perfect day.

“Yeah, it was.” Donna is smiling and her eyes are closing. Belatedly, Cam remembers that she should have made the damn table into a bed.

“I guess I should make up the bed, since I don’t think we’re going to make it much longer.” Cam wills herself to sit up and finds that she can’t quite manage it.

Donna leans against her. “This is fine.” She’s asleep almost before she finishes the sentence.

Cam closes her eyes too. Her last thought before she loses consciousness is that the bed is a little small, but if Donna is happy with the accommodations, Cam is, too. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like many of the beats in this fic, the idea to use Mazzy Star's Fade Into You as a major song for Donna and Cameron came out of long, wonderful private message exchanges with stealinghome on previously.tv. And now you all officially know where the title comes from!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna learns more about Cameron's past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fa la la la la!

Donna wakes groggily, unable to place her surroundings for at least thirty seconds. Gradually it all comes back to her—flying to Florida, finding the Airstream, breakfast, pinball, movies, trampoline, weed . . . Cameron.

Donna opens one eye and sees Cam sleeping peacefully beside her, head nesting on her own tangle of brown hair. She watches Cam for a moment, thinking about yesterday before remembering that today is Christmas.It’s the most un-Christmas-like Christmas morning that Donna has ever experienced, and she finds herself unexpectedly content with that thought. Being happy is just about the last thing she would have thought possible during these holidays, with both her daughters so far away, but happy she is nonetheless.

At that moment Cameron opens her eyes and looks straight at Donna. If she’s momentarily confused, she isn’t showing it. “Hey,” she says, smiling a little as she reanimates, as if waking up next to Donna is a perfectly normal event in her life.

“Hey yourself. Merry Christmas.” For some reason, Donna feels a lot less embarrassed about having fallen asleep in Cam’s bed than she probably ought to be feeling.

Cam groans. “So we didn’t sleep through it?I was hoping . . .”

“Nope. We slept for a long time, but I’m pretty sure it’s the 25th.” Donna checks her watch to make sure. Yes, December 25, 1994, 9:30 AM.

Cam puts the pillow over her head, as if doing that will be enough to block out the Yuletide horrors that lie ahead.

Sitting up, Donna can’t help laughing. “Ok, so . . . what time are you due at your Mom’s?And does this thing have a shower?” Donna is suddenly aware that she fell asleep in yesterday’s clothing and that she’s more disheveled than she remembers being since college. Luckily, she had thought to bring a decent outfit with her, since she had no idea at all how this visit was going to play out.

Cam’s head peeks out from underneath the pillow. “Around noon. And yes, I have a shower—I haven’t become a complete barbarian yet.You have no idea how much I’ve learned about the intricacies of grey water. It’s just _fascinating_.” At least Cam is smiling, which is something. Donna decides that there are a lot of things that she’d like to learn about before delving into grey water, whatever that might be.

 

**§§§**

After a Christmas breakfast of Pop Tarts, Pringles, and Better Cheddars, Donna showers and dresses while Cam takes a walk around the trailer park. When Cam returns, Donna has changed into grey wool slacks and a white silk shirt, adorned with a simple gold chain around her neck.As Donna frowns at herself in the trailer’s small mirror, she hears Cam huff a little behind her.

“What’s wrong?” Donna turns to Cam, noting her conflicted expression.

 “Nothing. It’s just . . . you look terrific. My mother is going to love you.” Cam doesn’t look terribly happy at the prospect, and Donna isn’t sure how to respond.

“It’s fine,” Cam says, not looking as though anything is actually fine at all. “I guess I should . .. do you want to . . .” Donna jumps up, suddenly awkward.

“Yeah, sure. I brought some work with me, so I’ll just sit in the car and go over it.” Donna hops out of the trailer to give Cam privacy to shower and dress. She wonders why her cheeks appear to be flushing at that thought, but she decides that it’s a normal enough reaction to what is shaping up to be a very strange Christmas indeed.

 

**§§§**

When Cam emerges from the trailer in a very presentable striped blouse and chinos, Donna glances at her watch and sees that they have about an hour before they’ll need to depart. Pushing her work file aside, she gets out of the car and moves toward the lawn chairs set up outside of the Airstream.

Cam follows Donna’s lead, sitting down in one of the chairs as Donna settles opposite her. They both regard the beautiful Florida morning silently for a few moments.

Donna is the first to speak. “So . . . who’s going to be at this dinner?” Donna has never asked Cameron anything about her family or her past, understanding without having to be told how difficult it is for Cam to talk about any of it. But forewarned is forearmed, and Donna wants to know as much about the situation as she can before she actually enters it.

Cam grimaces. “Well, there’s my mother. And Len, my stepfather. And Len’s daughter Nancy, who’s about my age. And Nancy’s husband Donald, and they have a little kid, a boy.” Cam becomes quiet after listing the cast of characters, and Donna feels inexplicably driven to find out more, to _know_ more.

“When did your mother marry Len?” That’s a safe enough question, thinks Donna. After all, she’s just asking for a date.

Cam looks at her, as if deciding exactly how far she wants to go with this, and then apparently makes up her mind. “I was in ninth grade when she met him, and she married him that summer.” Cam hesitates but then continues. “It was kind of a mess. My mom had been drinking a lot for years. She got a little better after they got married, but then for some reason it got much worse for my last year of high school.” Cam’s jaw twitches as she says this, and she doesn’t look at Donna.

Donna feels her throat tighten just a little. “Did you . . . was Len nice to you?”

Cam nods reluctantly. “He was ok, and Jesus, I don’t know how or why he stuck it out with my mom all that time. But Nancy really hated my guts. She didn’t live with us, but she and her mom were nearby, and she was over all the time.” Cam bites her lip, looking away. “She and my mom really hit it off. I think she was the kind of kid that my mom really wanted, someone normal, not a tech weirdo like me.” Cam tries to smile, but she can’t quite manage it.

Donna closes her eyes for just a second, thinking about Joanie and Haley, hoping that they never had to feel that sort of loneliness. “You’re not a weirdo.” It’s all Donna can come up with, and it’s so much less than she wishes she could say to Cameron right now.

Cam _does_ smile at that. “Yeah, I am. But I guess you are, too, so it’s all ok.”

 

**§§§**

Cam just nods when Donna suggests that she drive the two of them in her rented VW. At 12:15, they pull up in front of Cam’s mother’s condominium. Cam just sits there, grim and silent, as if she has no intention of ever getting out of the car. Donna thinks about taking her hand but settles on touching her arm and keeping it there for a moment. Cam looks at her with such open, unguarded gratitude that Donna’s heart flips a little in her chest.

Suddenly, Cam unbuckles her seat belt decisively. “Ok, well, let’s do this.” She gets out of the car, Donna following.

As Cameron rings the doorbell, Donna remembers that she hasn’t been invited to this dinner by the actual hostess. Before the unpleasant awkwardness of that thought has a chance to form fully, the door opens to reveal a slender, blonde woman almost a foot shorter than Cameron.

Cam takes in a breath and then exhales. “Mom, this is my . . . friend, Donna Emerson. She was in town and looked me up, and I invited her to dinner.” Cam has a stubborn set to her jaw that Donna recognizes from their Mutiny days, and apparently Cam’s mother recognizes it as well.

If Cameron’s mother is startled, she covers it expertly. “We’re happy to have you, Donna. I’m Cheryl Grossi.” Donna sees Cameron stiffen a little at the surname, and she wishes she could touch her arm again to make some of that tension go away.

They go inside, and Donna sees that the rest of the group is gathered in front of a large Christmas tree around a tray of cheese and crackers, sipping liquid from streaming mugs.Save for the palm trees and golf course that could be seen through the living room picture window, the scene might have appeared positively Dickensian.

Donna realizes that Cheryl is introducing her, and she puts on her brightest corporate smile as she assesses the room. Len, large and hearty, seems genuinely happy to have another guest in his house for Christmas. Nancy nods at her stiffly, making no eye contact at all. Donna takes in Nancy’s carefully applied makeup and power suit at a glance, suddenly recalling Cam’s crack from many years ago about Donna’s being a perfect Dillard’s housewife with big, judging eyes. Nancy’s husband Donald shakes Donna’s hand without really looking at her; his attention is on his son Cooper, who is busily crashing two toy trucks into each other on the floor.

Social niceties have always come easily for Donna; she is able to murmur appreciatively at the Christmas tree, compliment Cameron’s mother on the mulled cider, ask questions that are just the right mixture of interested and non-invasive, and smile at Cooper with only half of her attention. The other half is focused intensely on Cameron, who has eased herself into a metal folding chair, looking miserably uncomfortable both physically and emotionally. Donna tries to catch Cam’s eye to smile at her, but Cam is avoiding her gaze as well as that of everyone else in the room. Donna sighs inwardly, trying not to glance at her watch to see how much of the day has managed to progress. It was clearly going to be a long one.

 

**§§§**

After what feels like hours of pre-dinner chit chat in which Cam answers any direct question asked of her in monosyllables and sits silent the rest of the time, Len pronounces the ham ready and calls the group to the table.

“So, Donna, what do you usually do for Christmas?” Donna’s mother is busy passing platters of scalloped potatoes, macaroni and cheese, green peas, and biscuits around the table, but she seems to want to learn more about this person that her daughter has brought into her house.

Donna hesitates. “I have two teenage girls, and we usually spend Christmas together. But my older one is taking a year off between high school and college to travel, and my younger one wanted to spend Christmas with her in Thailand this year.” It’s a very abbreviated version of the full story, and it never mentions Gordon, but it’s all Donna can manage to recount to this group of strangers. She takes a bite of her slice of ham without really tasting it. She notices that Cam is looking at her searchingly, seemingly more present than she has been since they entered this house.

Donna’s mother is frowning a little. “Thailand?That’s . . . odd. Over the holidays?” She passes Donna the basket of biscuits, and Donna takes one without really noticing what she is doing. For some reason the words sting a little, even though there’s no rational reason that they should.

“There’s nothing odd about it.” Donna jerks her head around to see that Cam is actually glaring, hostility radiating off of her in waves. Donna tries to communicate silently to her to calm down and ease off, that she doesn’t have to do this, but Cam isn’t looking at her; her entire focus is on her mother.

Cam’s mother looks startled and tries to backtrack. “No, you’re right, of course there isn’t.People do all sorts of things these days.” Even though the words are meant to appease, the tone in which they are spoken is faintly disapproving. Cameron looks even angrier, and Donna wishes that she could disappear and take Cam with her.

“These scalloped potatoes are just delicious, Cheryl. I told you that it wouldn’t be too much having both potatoes and macaroni.It’s perfect.” It’s Len, and Donna has never been so glad to hear a remark about food in her life. She gives him a grateful glance, and he smiles at her. Glancing over, Donna sees Cam relax slightly and take a bite of her ham.Good.

They all eat for awhile in silence, and then Cameron’s mother looks at Donna, clearly gathering herself for another attempt. “So, you said that you work with Catherine? What do the two of you do together?”

Donna recalls that Bos mentioned to her once that Cameron’s real name was Catherine, and that Cameron had been her father’s name. “We’re business partners.We had a business together in the mid-eighties, and now we’re starting up something new together.” Donna likes saying that out loud, because each new person she announces it to makes Phoenix less of a pleasant dream and more of a reality.

“Business is so risky, isn’t it? I wish Catherine would get a nice job with a salary. That’s so much safer in the long run.” Donna sees that Cameron’s mother actually _does_ look concerned about her daughter, but the idea of Cameron having a safe and dull career is inconceivable to Donna. _She doesn’t have the faintest idea who Cameron actually is_ , she realizes, the thought filling her with sadness.

Donna realizes that Len is saying something. “Hell, if anyone can make it in the business world, Catherine can. She’s always been determined to get things done.” He smiles at Cam, who tries to smile back at him.

Nancy slaps down her napkin, looking really irritated at her father. “Determined. Sure, she was always determined. Determined to abandon her mother and get as far away from all of us as possible. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that it’s all ok.” She looks challengingly at Cam, who meets the look with a firebolt of her own. Donna closes her eyes for a moment, waiting for the explosion she knows will be coming. When it does, it’s a lot more measured than Donna might have thought.

“Nancy, none of this is your business. It’s between my mother and me, and it has nothing to do with you. At all. It never did.” Cam’s voice is shaking ever so slightly, but Donna wonders if she’s the only one in the room who notices it.

“None of my business?I care about your mother, which is more than you do. Do you know what it’s been like for her all of these years, never hearing from you? Did you ever think about that for a second? Or is it just the way it’s always been with you—you’re just so wrapped up in being the angry, misunderstood genius that you never give a thought to anyone else.” Nancy finishes all that in a burst, looking about as furious as Donna has ever seen anyone look.The entire room freezes, watching the uncomfortable drama unfold before them.

Face whitening, Cameron looks as though she’s just been hit squarely with a sledgehammer, and Donna feels a flash of rage so pure that it catches her off guard; she’s never before thought about what it might be like to punch someone hard and connect, but she’s thinking about it now. Cameron’s mother is the first to speak after Nancy’s outburst. “Don’t . . . this isn’t right. It’s Christmas, and she’s here now. The past is the past. We don’t need to worry about any of it.”

Nancy snorts. “Sure we don’t.Once again, Catherine just gets to skate away with all of her crappy behavior. That’s the way it was in high school, and that’s the way it’s always been. How can the two of you put up with this?”

Cameron appears to find her tongue after that. “ _My_ crappy behavior?Mine? I remember it a little differently.” She shoots daggers at Nancy and then turns to stare at her mother, who looks away.

“Do you think you’re the only kid in the world who grew up with a parent who drank a little too much sometimes? Just get over yourself.” Nancy seems suddenly aware that Cooper is starting to cry. “Would you take him out of here?” This is directed to Donald, who is more than happy to scuttle away from the table to oblige.

Len puts down his napkin. “That’s about enough of that. Go with them, will you?Donna, why don’t you help me put away some of these leftovers before we have dessert?” Nancy starts to say something, but Len shakes his head at her. “Just go and take care of your son.”

Donna realizes that Len wants to give Cameron and her mother a chance to talk alone. She’s not sure of the wisdom of the plan, but she has no choice except to follow his lead.She picks up some platters and follows him into the kitchen, watching a deflated Cameron out of the corner of her eye as she passes her.

Len is busily pulling plastic Tupperware out of one of the cabinets. He hands Donna a rubber spatula and she gets to work, scraping the macaroni into one container while Len scrapes the scalloped potatoes into another.

“Sorry about all that.” Len isn’t looking at Donna as he says it. “There’s a lot of . . . well, _stuff_ , between Nancy and Catherine, and between Catherine and her mother.I’m glad Catherine finally came home, but it’s going to take awhile for both of them to make it right.”

Donna finds the whole situation little short of heartbreaking. “Can you tell me . . . what exactly happened? Did Cheryl ever try to get in touch with Cam . . . with Catherine?” The name feels thick and alien on her tongue.

“Cheryl, well, she loved Catherine’s father heart and soul—he was the love of her life, completely.” Len says this easily, as something with which he’s long ago made peace. “He was killed when Catherine was nine, and I think Cheryl just sort of . . . checked out.Started drinking and just couldn’t deal with having a kid, especially one who looked just like her dead husband. It couldn’t have helped that she and Catherine had completely different interests. Cheryl told me that she made Catherine enter some kid beauty pageants right after her dad died. I know she meant well, but I just don’t think that would have been the way to go.” Len finally turns to look at Donna and sees her mouth hanging open at the thought of Cameron in beauty pageants. “Yeah.That’s what I think, too.” They both laugh.

Wrapping the ham in aluminum foil, Len continues his story. “Well, Cheryl was in better shape when we met and after we got married, but she took a real hard dive a couple of years later. I think she was just kind of scared of being happy with someone else, you know? She started drinking a lot again, and I think that just about broke whatever was left of her relationship with Catherine.When she took off, it was kind of a wakeup call to Cheryl. She got sober, and she tried to get in touch with Catherine a bunch of times, but Catherine never wanted to call her back. We really didn’t know anything about her life until this trip, and she hasn’t been exactly chatty about it with us, even now.” He gives Donna a wry smile.

Donna smiles back at him. “She doesn’t talk much about her family. I wish . . . I wish it weren’t this bad between the two of them.” And Donna does wish that, partially because she’s always thinking about Joanie and Haley and all the little and large ways that she’s failed them over the years.

“Well, you know how it is—they really hurt each other. Sometimes you can get over that, and sometimes you just can’t.” Len’s sentence hits Donna hard, makes her so grateful to be here, right now, with Cameron, about to start a new chapter in their lives.

“I hope they can get over it.” Donna wonders how likely this is.

“I hope they can, too.” Len hesitates for a moment. “I love Cheryl, but she can be hard, and critical. I know she tried not to do that with Catherine, but she is who she is, and it was worse when she drank. I think Catherine’s a lot more sensitive to that sort of thing than most people know.”

Donna looks at Len; this man is a real surprise. “Mothers and daughters can be complicated.”

Len gives her a slight grin. “That’s true. Nancy is really close to Cheryl, and she and I are close to one another, but she doesn’t get along with my ex-wife at all.Family is supposed to be this great thing, but it isn’t always an easy one.”

Donna nods, thinking of her own family, glad that even though she has her fights with the girls, nothing seems seriously wrong, at least not yet. She resolves to keep it that way.

“You’re a good friend, to come here with Catherine.” Len puts down his spatula to regard Donna fully. “This isn’t easy for her, for either of them. Cheryl’s got me, and she’s got Nancy to help get her through it, and I’m glad that Catherine has someone too.” He goes back to scraping, and Donna does the same. _I have a lot of years of being a bad friend to make up for_ , she thinks to herself.

 

**§§§**

When Donna and Len finally re-enter the living room, Cameron and her mother are the only ones there. Donna sees that Cameron appears to be a little less stiff, so she surmises that, at the very least, the talk with her mother hadn’t made things any worse. Cam actually gives her a small smile, and she returns it with relief.

Cameron’s mother looks up at Donna. “I apologize for what you had to hear; Nancy is more protective of me than she needs to be.”

Donna nods. “I understand.” And she does; it’s hard to watch someone you care about be hurt without wanting to swing back and defend them. She feels the same way about Cameron that Nancy obviously feels about Cheryl, after all.

Cameron gets up out of her chair a little abruptly.“I think maybe we should get going.”

Len looks at her. “But you haven’t had dessert.We have two kinds of pie, and I know you love pie.”

Cameron fidgets. “I just think . . . I mean, this way the rest of you can have dessert and not have things be weird. It’s ok; I’m not upset, but I just think it would be better.”

Cameron’s mother looks at her daughter unhappily. “I’m sorry about all this. It was still wonderful to see you. Can you take some pie home with you?”

Cameron nods. “Sure. That would be great.” She takes a deep breath and visibly relaxes as she exhales—probably, Donna thinks, because an end to the visit is suddenly in sight.

As Len leaves the room to prepare the packages of pie-to-go, Cameron’s mother retrieves a gift-wrapped box from her bedroom.She hands the package to Cam. “Merry Christmas.”

Cam looks a little embarrassed. “But I didn’t get anything for you guys. I didn’t think . . .”

Cameron’s mother smiles, a softer look than Donna has seen on her the entire visit. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just so happy you’re here.” And Donna can see that she really is, that whatever difficulties there are between the two of them, in her own way, this woman does love Cameron.

Cameron looks at her mother and then looks away. “Me, too,” she mutters. Cameron’s mother hesitates for a second and then gives Cam an awkward hug. Cameron doesn’t return it, but she doesn’t pull away, either. Donna’s eyes can’t seem to help welling up at the sight.

At that moment Len comes back with the pie, smiling when he sees Cameron and her mother.He walks over to Cam and taps her on the shoulder, a physically awkward expression of what is clearly real affection. “It was really great having you here, Catherine. Have a safe trip back to California.”

“Thanks, Len.” Cameron’s voice is a little wobbly, but the small smile she manages is real. “I . . . I appreciate everything.”

Len taps Cam again and then looks at Donna. “It was great meeting you, Donna. You guys take care of each other.” Len’s eyes are moving back and forth between Cameron and Donna thoughtfully. Donna looks at him sharply; his tone seems to imply more than the casual comment should warrant, and she’s not sure what he might mean by it.But she shakes that off and just nods back at him; yes, of course she and Cameron will take care of each other. That goes without saying.

 

**§§§**

Cam is silent on the drive back to the Airstream, and Donna can’t really blame her; the whole day had felt like an emotional wringer even for her, and she can’t imagine how it must have affected Cameron.It’s starting to get dark, and when Donna glances over, she sees Cam slumped against the window of the passenger seat, eyes half-closed, clutching the still-wrapped Christmas gift in her lap.Donna is suddenly assaulted by a wave of affection so strong that the force of it almost causes her to swerve the car. She turns away from Cam to escape it, remaining quiet until they pull into the trailer park.

Inside theAirstream, Cameron sits down on the bed and seems to come slowly back to life. She looks at Donna, sighs, and shakes her head. “Sorry about that shitty Christmas.”

Donna sits next to her. “It wasn’t shitty. It was just . . . I wish it didn’t have to be like that for you.” Donna would like to say more, to tell Cam how sorry she is for the thousand ways she could have been a better friend if she’d understood Cameron more. Since she can’t quite manage that, she settles for taking Cam’s hand and squeezing it slightly.

Cameron looks at Donna. “Thanks for being there. It really meant a lot.” Cam starts to say more but then stops.

Donna looks at her, struck by Cam’s palpable sincerity. “So . . . how about that pie?”

Cam grins her first real smile since they woke up that morning. “It’s a good thing that Len bakes, because on top of everything else, my mother was always a terrible cook.”

The package turns out to contain big pieces of blueberry and apple pie, and they’re delicious. Donna devours hers, realizing that in all the tension of the day she never managed to get much to eat, and she assumes that Cam hadn’t either.

After they finish, Donna eyes the gift from Cam’s mother. “Are you going to unwrap that?” She’s curious what it could be.

Cam shrugs. “I guess so.” She looks much less curious than Donna.

Donna watches as Cameron takes the wrapping paper off slowly and carefully. When it finally falls away, she looks at the box inside and emits a peculiar noise somewhere between a barked laugh and a groan.

“What?” When Cam turns the box toward her, Donna can’t decide whether to be horrified or amused.It’s a boxed set of VHS tapes called _Thirty Days to a Whole New You_. 

Amused wins out. Donna starts to laugh, and after a beat or two, Cam joins her. “Well, she’s not exactly subtle, is she?” says Donna.

Cam just shakes her head, pushing the box aside. “Nope, no she’s not. She was always trying to improve me. She tried that with Len at first, too, but he just sort of waved her off.”

Donna sighs inwardly at the very idea of giving Cam such a gift. It was either passive aggressive or really, really tone-deaf, and neither one boded well for the future relationship of Cam and her mother.

Cam looks at her suddenly. “Hey . . . we haven’t talked about tomorrow, or going back to California, or whatever. Are you . . . going to be driving back with me?” Cam asks this last part in a rush, as if she’s nervous about what Donna’s reaction might be to the question.

Donna’s reaction is one of shock; she genuinely hadn’t really thought of much beyond today, and she had assumed she’d just be flying back the way she’d come.But suddenly, the thought of driving across the country in Cameron’s truck, sleeping in the Airstream at night, sounds wonderful. (Gordon, she thinks, would probably be surprised, or annoyed, or both, to realize that Donna actually might be up for quasi-camping with someone other than him.)

“I . . . hadn’t thought about it. I need to get back by New Year’s Eve, because Haley is coming home on January 1.” Practical details always crowd out emotional implications in Donna’s mind, and she finds that tendency a relief right now.

“We can make it,” Cam sounds confident.“We’ll leave first thing in the morning, and we should be able to get home in six days if we put in the hours—we can share the driving. And I’ll set up the second bed tonight, so you won’t have to be squashed again.” Cam reddens a little, and Donna feels some peculiar feeling of regret about the thought of that second bed.But of course, it’s certainly what should be done.

“Ok, I’m in,” says Donna, throwing both caution and the price of her non-refundable return plane ticket to the winds of fate. Excitement is starting to flood through her. Everything in her life had started to change with her idea about the digital juke box, and adding an unexpected cross-country road trip into the mix seems just about perfect.

Later that night, Donna can tell from Cam’s regular breathing across the Airstream that she has dropped off into a deep, exhausted sleep almost as soon as they turned off the lights. Donna, however, lies awake for quite awhile, reflecting on the day. She thinks about Cameron’s mother, wanting so much to connect to a daughter that she just doesn’t understand and never will. She thinks about Len and his kindness, his love for his wife and his obvious wish to help heal her rift with Cameron.Most of all, Donna thinks about Cam, about how little she really knew her during their time working together at Mutiny, how she had somehow never clocked to the fact that Cam’s brashness and anger and antisocial behavior masked so many layers of pain and sensitivity and love. But Donna gets it now, or at least, some of it; it’s all too easy to fail to _see_ Cameron, but now that she finally does, she realizes that this _seeing_ is something quite separate from the _longing for her_ and the _missing her_ and the _admiring her_ that she’d felt for so many years. Maybe if she had really seen her in their Mutiny days, none of the awfulness would have happened at all.

With that thought, Donna finally drifts off to sleep herself, dreaming about tomorrow’s adventure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was almost too easy for me to create a full-blown dysfunctional family for Cameron. Read into that what you will!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna and Cameron return to California.

Years later, Cameron would consider the drive back to California with Donna as the true beginning of Phoenix and everything that followed. Donna’s impromptu trip to Florida was a teaser, and a wonderful one, but their new act really started after that. The details would blur, but the pure joy in their unending conversation about big things and little things would always remain. Even though she had every intention of seeing as much of the country as she could on this trip, Cam finds herself rarely even glancing out the window at the unfurling of the United States.Wherever they might be, whatever she could be seeing, there is always just Donna, and more talking than they’d ever done in the whole time they’ve known each other. It was, she reflected once or twice, very much like that all-day phone conversation with Joe, except much longer and on steroids.

**§§§**

**Florida**

“So . . . how did it go when you talked to your mother when we went to do the dishes?” It has taken Donna two hours to ask this question, but Cam can see that it’s something she really wants to know.

“Uh. . . ok, I guess. She was trying, anyway.” In truth, Cameron doesn’t really know what she thinks about that talk. It certainly wasn’t a Lifetime Channel fall-into-each-other’s-arms-and-forget-the-past sort of thing, but it also made her realize how sorry her mother really was for all the stuff that happened between them.Sorry isn’t everything, and it might not ever be enough, but it’s not nothing, either.

Donna nods. “That’s good.” Cam glances away from the road long enough to see Donna smiling at her, and she smiles back. Cam wonders if Donna has any idea just how much it means to her that Donna came to Florida, if she’ll ever be able to tell her properly. That Christmas dinner wasn’t great, but it would have been so much worse if she didn’t have Donna next to her the whole time. It was the only thing that made the unbearable semi-tolerable.

Cam clears her throat a little. “What did you and Len talk about?”

Donna smiles again. “Well . . . you.”

Cam rolls her eye.“Great. I’m sure he made me look awesome.” She thinks to herself that Len would have had a perfect right to bust on her all the way to next Sunday, after the way she’d always treated him.

“He did, actually.” Donna’s voice is suddenly serious. “He really seems to care about you.I . . . I liked him.”

Cameron sighs. “I don’t know why he would have done that. I was an asshole to him in high school.” And she really had been. She wishes now that she’d cut him some slack. Cam always assumed that he was only nice to her to score points with her mother, but now she considers the possibility that Len was just . . . _nice_.

“Well, you were a teenager, and he was the grownup. Everyone knows that teenagers can be awful, and we just have to get through it. I mean, look at Joanie.” Donna shakes her head, clearly thinking just how hard it can be with her daughters sometimes.

“Yeah. I hope I’m a little less awful now.” Cam sighs again, and Donna laughs.

**  
§§§**

**Alabama**

“Favorite non-sci fi movie.Go!” Donna has been quiet for the last half hour or so, seemingly dozing while Cameron drives.But now she’s wide awake, cocking her head and waiting for Cameron to answer.

“Um . . . well, do horror movies count as sci fi?” Cam really, really likes _Carrie_.

“Well, no, they wouldn’t technically count, but let’s change the parameters.Favorite non- _genre_ movie.Go!” Donna is laughing now.

“Ok.Well, I actually don’t do a lot of movies. But did you ever see _Heathers_?” Cam answers a little tentatively, not knowing what Donna will think of a weird black comedy like that one.

“Yeah, I saw it.That’s your favorite?” Donna _does_ sound surprised.

“Sort of.Winona Ryder was really great in it.And I hated all the popular kids in my high school, so I liked how the movie kind of got to the root of all that awfulness.” Cam hasn’t thought about _Heathers_ in awhile—it came out while she was in Japan, and she had to see it as a bootleg—but something about it had really stuck with her.

“Huh.” Donna looks as though she’s about to say more, but then she stops herself.

Cam gives her a half-smile.“Don’t tell me—you were one of the popular kids in high school, right?We probably would have hated each other.”

Donna’s eyes soften a little.“I don’t think we would have hated each other. No, I wasn’t popular; I was just sort of an ordinary band geek, totally blending into the woodwork.”

Cam thinks about Donna in a band uniform, and she finds the image hilarious.“So what about you?What’s _your_ favorite non-genre movie?”

Donna looks embarrassed. “Would you believe _Field of Dreams_?Or maybe _Dead Poets Society_?”

Cam groans.“You have a sentimental streak, Donna Emerson. We’re going to have to do something about that.” She’d never tell Donna that she secretly likes _Dead Poets Society_ too.Sure, it’s no _Heathers_ , but that “O, Captain, My Captain” scene is pretty awesome. How do you not love it when the shy kid finds a way to stand up to the authoritarian jerks?

**  
§§§**

**Tennessee**

Donna is taking a driving shift when she looks over at Cam and asks casually, “Were you really in beauty pageants when you were a kid?”

Cam glances away for a second. “Len told you that?”

Donna nods as Cam looks back at her.

Cam grimaces. “Yeah, my mother thought it would be a _fantastic_ way for me to get over my father.She just loved those things, all that primping and preening and dressing up. I hated them, of course, but the worst thing about being a kid is how powerless you are.Life just happens to you, and you can’t do anything about it.” Cam stops, thinking about how glad she is to be an adult, driving in this truck with Donna, everything about childhood far behind her.

“How old were you?”Donna is a little tentative, as if she’s unsure how much Cam is willing to talk about any of it.

“I was nine when I started, and I guess I was eleven when my mother let me quit.” Cam had been so, so glad when her mother finally gave up on her ever becoming a pageant star.Sure, it meant that her mother had more or less given up on her, too, but it seemed worth the tradeoff at the time.

Donna shakes her head. “It kind of sounds like a nightmare. Kids shouldn’t be judged on how they look.Nobody should be, really.”

Cameron nods.“That’s for sure. And the thing of it was, I pretty much always lost, and of course I would have. I didn’t belong in pageants. I was big and gawky and nothing like my mother thought I should be. She was always really small and delicate, and that’s the way she wanted me to look. And no matter how much she tried, I was never going to be that.” Cameron is suddenly remembering how she towered over the other girls in those pageants, feeling like a clumsy giant in a room full of delicate china figurines.

Donna is quiet for a moment, and then she looks away from the road to stare at Cameron.“Cameron . . . you . . . I mean . . . you know that you’re beautiful, right?” Flushing slightly, Donna says it as a fact, not as a compliment, and as if she’s suddenly discovered that Cam doesn’t know how to tell time or understand that storm clouds generally lead to rain.

Cam gapes at her; all she can think of responding with is a derisive snort. Beautiful?That’s ridiculous. When she reflects on how she looks, which she rarely does, she thinks she’s fine, perfectly ok, nicely average.Cam knows she’s not ugly.But beautiful?Donna is beautiful. Cam is just . . . whatever.

When Cam doesn’t follow the snort up with anything else, Donna focuses back on the road, suddenly looking very sad.

“What?” Cam is finding this whole conversation extremely weird.

Donna just sighs.“It’s just . . . the ways we screw up our kids.” She’s quiet for the next hour.

**  
§§§**

**Kentucky**

Cam shifts a little, deciding to bring up something that’s been on her mind. “Donna?”

“Yeah?” Donna has been shuffling through some articles about digital audio, but she pushes them aside to look at Cam.

“Um . . . how are we going to handle Phoenix and Symphonic Ventures? I mean, you’re going to be doing both, right?” Cam asks this a little nervously. She can’t imagine that Donna would want to quit her job, but she also doesn’t want Phoenix to be just some sort of subset of a giant VC firm; Phoenix needs to be _theirs_.

Cameron watches the road, but she feels Donna’s eyes on her. “I can handle both while we ramp up. Once we really get going, I’ll probably step down as managing partner, so I can have more time to concentrate on Phoenix.” Donna says all that matter-of-factly, as though it’s something that she’s thought through already, and of course she would have. Cameron feels some relief over the fact that the success of Phoenix seems to be as important to Donna as it is to her.

Cam hesitates again before asking, “You said that you wanted Symphonic to be the one that negotiates the rights with the record labels. So you’re thinking about them as a partner off the bat?” Cam knows that Symphonic could probably handle the legal stuff a lot more efficiently than she and Donna could on their own, but the idea of it makes her uneasy nonetheless.

“That’s something we’d need to talk about. Yeah, I thought it was a good idea, but we’re in this together. Equal equity, co-founders, equal say in everything. Remember?” Donna looks at Cam, who nods. She _does_ remember, naturally.

“Cam . . . can you tell me what you’re actually worried about?” Donna’s voice is serious, and Cam wants to give her a real answer

“It’s just . . . I kind of hate VC firms, after Mutiny. I mean, we were really fine until Diane came along. Maybe we would have kept being fine without her.” Cam has never spoken aloud of this buried grudge that she holds again Diane, but she’s glad to push it into the surface at last.

Donna doesn’t answer for a moment. “That’s complicated. I can promise you one thing, though; I’m never going to let anything like that happen again, with or without Symphonic.Ok?” Donna sounds almost fervent, and the force of her tone serves as a powerful tonic to Cam. 

“Ok.” Cam is feeling better now.Maybe it really _is_ going to be different this time around.

**  
§§§**

**Indiana**

“You didn’t screw up your kids.” Cam is fiddling with the radio as she says this to Donna.

“What?” Donna stares at Cam, who is aware that this comment must seem like a non sequitur; they had been talking ten minutes ago about the terrible food in the last diner they’d stopped at.

“You said something about how we mess up our kids. I just wanted to say that yours aren’t. Messed up, that is.”

Donna gives her a half-laugh. “I think I said that a couple of fairly large states ago.”

“Even so.” Cam has been giving what Donna had said then a lot of thought. “Your kids are great.Theymight be the least-screwed-up kids I’ve ever met.” Not, Cam thinks, that she’s actually met a _lot_ of kids.

Donna sighs. “Sure, if you don’t count how I divorced their sick father, and how he died after that, and how Joanie doesn’t seem to want to be in the same country as me, and how Haley hasn’t been able to tell me that she’s gay yet. But aside from all that . . . they’re probably fine.” Donna tries to pass all that off as a joke, but Cameron can see how much she actually means it.

“Donna . . . all that stuff is just, well, _life_. You’re always there for them, and you always have been. And you also really _know_ them, like, who they really are. Trust me, not everyone has that with their parents.” Cam suddenly thinks it’s really important to make sure Donna gets how lucky Haley and Joanie are.

“Thanks.” Donna does sound genuinely grateful. “And Cam . . . you’ve always been there for them, too.They love you.”

Cam thinks about how much she loves Joanie and Haley too, although it’s hard for her to say that out loud. “I’ve been . . . glad to know them.” It’s all Cam can manage.

“I know you don’t want kids, and that’s perfectly ok. But I do want you to know how great you’ve been with mine, even when they were small and annoying.” Donna almost sounds tearful in her sincerity.

“Well, it was easier then.It’s harder, now that they’ve become big and annoying.” It’s the right time for a joke, and Cameron is pleased when Donna laughs openly at it.

 

**§§§**

**Illinois**

“So what did you learn about audio files while I was driving across the country?” Cam knows that Donna only had about two weeks before she herself left for Tallahassee, but she also knows that Donna would have put that time to good use—if there’s anyone who could be trusted to dig into the details of a project, it’s Donna.

“Well, I learned that the audiophiles are the enemies of the audio files.” Donna laughs at her own wordplay, and Cam (not having a clue what she could be talking about) just stares at her

“Sorry.I mean, it turns out that there are all of these audiophiles who care a ton about sound that can’t even be perceived by the human ear, and they don’t like the idea of electronic audio files.Anyway . . . the tech situation is complicated.”

“When isn’t it?” However complicated it might be, Cam is up for it. “Executive summary?”

“So, ok.I still really like the MP3. The guy who invented it, Karlheinz Brandenburg, is in Germany, and by all accounts he’s a bona fide genius. He’s actually the student of the person who tried to get the patent for the original digital jukebox in the 1980s, the one that was rejected.”

“What’s so great about the MP3?” Cam knows that Donna is about to tell her whether she asks or not, but she wants to keep up her end of the conversation.

“It’s smaller and it sounds better than the other formats, for one thing.But there’s lots of politics—Brandenburg is really an academic, and he’s up against sharks from all over Europe with the clout to squash him.” Donna shakes her head. Cam knows how she feels; it’s always frustrating when lesser technology wins out over better ones—look at Betamax and VHS.

They’ll need to be smart from the outset, Cam thinks, if Phoenix is going to be a success. “Even if the MP3 is great, we’ll need to develop something that’s flexible enough for us to flip over to a different audio format, in case something else wins out.We shouldn’t tie ourselves to one thing if we don’t have to.” Cam is thinking about Mutiny’s exclusive use of the Commodore 64.That turned into a real weakness, one she’s anxious not to repeat.

Donna is nodding. “I totally agree.We can discuss it more later, but we need to be nimble from the beginning.”

The more they talk about the project, the more excited Cam gets.She looks impatiently at the odometer, wishing that they were in California already.

 

**§§§**

**Missouri**

Donna finally asks Cameron about Joe during a stop for a picnic lunch at a state park on a sunny afternoon. “Have you tried to get in touch with him?”

Munching on her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Cam shakes her head. “No. I don’t have a phone number for him, and I haven’t had time to write a letter from the road.Maybe when we get back.” But maybe not, Cam thinks to herself. She’s not sure she’s ready to have Joe in her life again.

Donna looks at her. “You know, if you want to talk about it . . . you can.I know that Joe and I have had our problems, but that’s all starting to feel like a long time ago. We’ve all changed.”

And they all have, of course. Cam thinks about how she never felt as though she could talk to Joe about Donna, but talking to Donna about Joe seems like an actual possibility now. “I dunno.I . . . I do miss him. I wish things had been different, but I don’t think it was ever going to work.”

“Why not?” Cam can tell that Donna really wants to hear her answer.

“It was just . . . we pushed each other in the wrong ways. I loved him, and I know he loved me, but we just didn’t totally _fit_. Part of it was the kids thing, but not all of it.” Cam is groping to explain how Joe would want to use her to help his projects, how he would praise her when she probably needed criticism and criticize her when she needed praise.It wasn’t all the time, but it happened enough that they were often not in sync with one another. She needed something that he just couldn’t give—what exactly that was, she couldn’t really say—and the reverse was probably true as well. _Almost but not quite_ , Cam thinks, can really be sadder than _not at all_.

Donna sighs. “What the romance movies don’t tell you is that there’s so much more to a relationship than just love. Love is great, and it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Gordon and I loved each other, but it . . .”

Cameron finishes the thought. “It wasn’t enough.”

“Yeah.” They sit together in silence for a moment, eating their sandwiches and watching the sunlight dappling among the trees.

Donna finally looks at Cam with a slight smile on her face. “Well, I’ve never had two men fighting over me the way Joe and Tom fought over you during that browser meeting.Joe falling through the floor was . . . dramatic.”

Cam snorts. “It was pretty stupid.I was actually kind of fed up with both of them during those meetings. I couldn’t stand how they just sort of took over and started explaining the World Wide Web to us. I mean, I know I was still mad at you and felt weird about being there, but it was _your_ meeting, not theirs.”

Donna nods. “Yeah, it was; I was irritated too. But that happens so often to me in meetings that I’ve gotten used to it.”

Cam thinks about that for a second; it happens a lot to her, too. “We need a word for that.”

“For what?”

“For when men try to tell us stuff that we know perfectly well, maybe even better than they do.” Cam takes a sip of her Coke, thinking about it.

“Yeah, we do. Let’s put inventing that word on the first quarter objectives list for Phoenix.” Donna laughs, and Cam joins her.

 

**§§§**

**Kansas**

“What was the best summer you ever had?” They have been driving in companionable silence for awhile, but by now Cam is used to the rhythms of their near-continuous conversations.  
****

“Hmm.Well, I think . . . it would have to be when I was seven. That sounds a little pathetic, doesn’t it? It was the last summer before my father left for Vietnam. My mother was working a ton, so it was just the two of us.We just did regular stuff—ice cream, he taught me to ride my bike, we went to arcades, he read me stories and we talked about them—but I just remember not worrying about _anything_ during that whole time. I don’t think it’s ever been like that for me since.” Cam hasn’t thought about that summer again until this very moment, but it all comes back to her now: how free and loved she had felt.She wonders if she’ll ever feel like that again.

Donna is quiet for a moment. “I guess mine was the summer Gordon and I were building the Symphonic together. We were just in this sort of bubble, just the two of us,like we were the only people in the world.” She falls silent, and Cam knows how painful and conflicted Donna’s feelings about Gordon are. She wishes there were something that she could do or say to make it easier.

“You know, Donna—even if it didn’t totally work with Gordon, it’s great how much you were always there for each other. He loved you a lot.” Cam knows this to be absolutely true, and she hopes that it’s the right thing to say.

When she sees Donna’s grateful glance, she knows that it was. “Thanks, Cam.”

They’re both quiet for awhile. Buoyed by the prospect of Phoenix, Cam is thinking about the possibility that next summer might make it into her top ten favorite summers list, and she wonders if Donna is thinking that too.

 

**§§§**

**Colorado**

“It was pretty great to see the first Mutiny building again,” Cam has been dozing while Donna drives, and for some reason, that sentence pops out of her mouth as she pulls herself back into consciousness.  
****

Donna looks over at her. “I’ll bet it was.When you told me that you were there, I really wanted to see it with you. The beginning of Mutiny was . . . well, it really was just about as important to me as marrying Gordon and having the kids.” She looks a little embarrassed at this, but Cameron knows exactly what Donna means.She feels the same way.

Cameron nods. “Phoenix is going to be like that, too.”

Donna tilts her head thoughtfully.“Cam, this time around, we really need to talk. I’ve thought and thought and thought obsessively about what happened with us, and it all really came down to communication.Other stuff too, but we just didn’t talk enough.”

Cam grins at her. “Well, we’ve certainly made up for that in the last few days.”

Donna smiles too, but a little absently.Cam can see how serious she is about what she’s saying. “If I had only apologized to you after I lied about Doug and Craig, if I had told you _why_ I did it, maybe none of the other stuff would have happened. And maybe I wouldn’t have destroyed the company.” Donna’s voice is low as she says the last sentence.

Cam jerks her head around to stare at her.They rarely talk about what happened at Mutiny, and Donna has never told Cam explicitly how guilt-ridden she is about it. “Donna . . . just because you were wrong about the IPO doesn’t mean I was right.” It’s something that Cam has thought for years but has never said out loud to anyone.

Donna glances at her and then looks back at the road. “You were right that we should have made some changes before going public.”

“Sure, but we didn’t need to make all those changes I wanted.Maybe we should just have waited six months and diversified to other platforms.I think it really was the dependence on the C-64 that killed the whole thing.” Cam sees Donna’s shoulders relax a bit.

Donna is silent for a moment, and what she finally says surprises Cam. “You tried to talk to me at Comdex when you said that working with me was the most fun you’d ever had in your life. That was . . . brave.”

Cameron winces a little, remembering. “I think I just wanted you to say that it was fun for you, too.” She’s surprised that she can actually manage to confess this to Donna when it’s something that she’s barely articulated to herself.

Donna glances at her, suddenly looking as though she might cry. “Cam, of _course_ it was fun for me too. It was the most fun I ever had, the best thing I’ve ever done. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell you that, why all I could do was talk about the project. I don’t know why I could never tell you that I missed you, or that you were a really important friend to me, or that I was _sorry_.I don’t know a lot of things.”

A hollow spot deep inside Cameron fills a little at Donna’s words. “Well, it’s not as though I was great at it, either.”

“We can’t make those mistakes again, not this time around.” Donna is watching the road again, but her voice is strong and sure.

“We won’t.”Cameron is confident about that.Things are different now; things are better.

**  
§§§**

**Utah**

“Ok, favorite foods.” Donna looks over at Cameron, who has been driving for the last couple of hours.

“Uh . . . I don’t know. I think my favorite food is breakfast for dinner.”Cam thinks about how much she’d like bacon and eggs right now, with hash browns and an English muffin on the side.

“That’s not a food, that’s a meal.” Donna is shaking her head as she says this.

Cam laughs at her. “Has anyone ever told you that you have a lot of arbitrary rules that you expect everyone to follow?I like breakfast for dinner.Breakfast for breakfast is fine too, but the same foods taste better at night than they do in the morning.”

Donna accepts this. “Ok, you have a point.”

“What about you?What’s your favorite food?” Cam knows, at least, that it isn’t Beef Carpaccio.

Donna thinks about the question for a moment. “I think maybe Chicken Marbella.”

“What’s that?” Cam has never heard of it.

“Oh, it’s this chicken thing that got really popular maybe five years ago.For awhile, it was the main course at every other dinner party I went to.I always loved it.”

“Huh.” Cam imagines Donna going to dinner parties, thinks about how different the past eight years have been for the two of them.

Donna is continuing.“I really never cook anymore—there just isn’t time for it.Yet another way I’m failing as a parent.” But Donna is smiling as she says that, so Cam gathers her lack of cooking isn’t actually something that she feels bad about.

“What are Joanie and Haley’s favorite foods?”

“Joanie is crazy about coconut custard pie.It’s gotten so that we have pie for her birthday instead of cake. Haley really seems to love those Bagel Bites.” Donna grimaces as she says this, and Cam laughs.

“Well, she's right.They’re pretty great.”

Donna nods. “They’re better than they look. Hey, this is making me hungry.Can we stop for lunch soon?”

Cam nods. “Definitely.” She’s hungry too.

 

**§§§**

**Nevada**

“Do you keep in touch with Katie at all?” They’ve pulled over to a rest stop for the night and have just turned off the lights to go to sleep when Cam hears Donna’s voice in the darkness.

“A little.I mean, a couple of emails.We weren’t really friends—I liked her and all, but we didn’t know each other well. She was gone when I went to work at Comet for those few months.” Cam wonders what prompted the question.

She hears Donna sigh. “I just kind of have this feeling that she’s somehow part of this weird little family that we’ve created and that Gordon would want me to make sure that she was ok. But we don’t know each other at all, and obviously the whole situation is incredibly awkward.”

Cam wonders if she’s also part of the weird little family, but she doesn’t ask.“She’s really cool, and chances are she’d like to hear from you. She and Haley got pretty close, but it’s hard for kids to be the ones to keep up contact with adults.” Cam thinks about how she alwaysmanaged to keep in touch with Joanie after she left for Tokyo, even though it meant brushing against Donna’s world when she did it. Then again, she thinks now, maybe some part of her wanted to keep brushing against Donna just a tiny little bit.

“Yeah.Maybe I’ll email her.Email is . . . easier.” Cam nods, her thoughts turning to Joe, wondering if she could get an email address for him. Email _is_ easier.

Donna doesn’t say anything more, and soon both of them drift off to sleep.

 

**§§§**

**California**

They pull into Donna’s driveway at around 4:00 pm on New Year’s Eve.Cam is about as exhausted and as energized as it's possible to be simultaneously, and Donna looks exactly the way she feels.They regard each other, uncertain about how to transition from the endless road trip into some semblance of regular life.  
****

Cam is wandering around Donna’s living room, idly thinking about how hungry she is—they hadn’t stopped for lunch that day, because both of them were eager to get home as quickly as possible—when she hears Donna yell from the kitchen.

“What’s wrong?” Cam can’t tell what sort of yell this is, but when Donna charges toward her, grinning, she surmises that nothing terrible has happened.

“Looks like New Years Eve fairies have been here. Diane left us some poached salmon, parsley potatoes, green beans, and chocolate cake.And I just found a bottle of chilled champagne, too.” Donna is brandishing a note, and Cam can see that it simply says “Happy New Year!”

“Wow.”Cam’s mouth is watering. “How did you she know when we were coming back here?”

“I called her, just to check in.I can’t believe she did this. I was just thinking that I had absolutely nothing in the house to eat at all, and that we’d have to ring in the New Year with stale Triscuits and sliced American cheese.” Donna catches Cam’s eye, and Cam grins back at her.Triscuits and cheese would normally be fine with her, but after so many days on the road and so much junk food, she’s more than ready for a real meal.

Donna goes for a swim while Cam takes a shower, luxuriating in the space and the plentiful hot water after her weeks in the Airstream. After Donna finishes swimming and showers herself, she heats up the food and carries it outside to eat by the pool, putting the champagne in an ice bucket on a table next to their chaise lounges. It’s dark by now, but the evening is pleasant and the pool lights reflecting off the water remind Cam of the way that Gordon’s garden had looked the night that she and Donna began to find their way back to one another after their endless years of estrangement. After devouring her dinner, Cam closes her eyes, thinking that she’s rarely felt such a pleasant combination of drowsy, full, and content.

Donna’s eyes are closing, too. “We’re never going to make it to midnight at this rate.”

Cam opens her eyes and smiles. “Sure we will.We’re not _that_ old yet.”

“But just in case we _are_ that old, how about opening that champagne now?” Donna has one hand on the bottle already.

“Well, sure, we can do that. In deference to the fact that you’re a whole lot older than I am, I’ll allow it.” Cam’s lips twitch a little.

“Shut up.” Donna is looking at her with that flashing look of fondness that always makes Cam melt a little inside.

When the champagne is poured into little flute glasses that seem to materialize out of nowhere, Donna raises one for a toast. “To Phoenix, and to a wonderful 1995. Happy New Year, Cam!”

Cam lifts her glass back, thinking that she can’t remember looking forward to a new year as much as she’s looking forward to this one. 1995 is already great, and it hasn’t even really begun yet. Cameron can’t wait to see what's going to happen next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the _Heathers_ thing is a shoutout to Angelina Burnett, one of the Halt writers who said on Twitter that the only regret about the show she has is the fact that she never got in a reference to that movie. I think there's just about zero chance that Angelina will ever find her way to this fic, and if she does she's likely to be horrified. (I can't imagine what fic would look like to staff writers, but I surmise it wouldn't look good!) But just in case she ever has a fluish weekend where she wants to read weird stuff that she wouldn't ordinarily look at . . . hi, there, Angelina! I think you're awesome, and I'm happy to give this little thing to you. :-)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Phoenix commences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so it begins.

Even though she knows that Cameron will mock the very idea, the first thing Donna wants to do is to create a vision statement for Phoenix.

“Jesus, when exactly did you turn into such a corporate suit?” Cam asks, rolling her eyes as far as eyes can physically be rolled. “Are we going to have to write a mission statement too? What about a list of company objectives?”

Donna ignores her. “I know it sounds stupid—hell, ok, in some ways it _is_ stupid, but I think we need to do it.It’s just for us, not for some hypothetical Board of Directors.”

“But why? We should just dive in and talk about the _work_ , not some project management bullsh . . . stuff.” Cam sounds as though she’s honestly attempting not sound as impatient as she feels, but she’s also failing miserably.

Donna looks at her, wishing she could make Cam understand why this is so important to her when she’s barely sure of it herself. She attempts it anyway. “This thing—Phoenix—it’s a do-over. Life doesn’t give us many of those, and I don’t want to waste it. It’s just . . . . too big a deal.”

Cam frowns, obviously trying. “But I don’t get it. I know it’s a big deal—it’s a big deal to me, too. But how will any of this help?”

Donna sighs. “Ok.Here’s one. Do you remember how we said we were going to talk more this time around?That can be a thing.” Donna writes “Talk more” on the flip chart in front of them.

Cam studies it, perhaps looking just a fraction less dubious about the whole enterprise. “That’s a vision statement?I thought a vision statement would be something that the company itself is going to do, like ‘Fill the world with music,’ or something like that.”

Donna smiles. “A little trite, but I like it anyway!” She writes it down under “Talk more.” “And you’re right—most vision statements are one-sentence tag lines about the company’s overarching purpose. But we don’t have to be slavish about it.I just want it to be a list of stuff that we can look at when things get a little rough, so we can remember what we’re about fundamentally. It’s easy to forget that.”

Despite herself, Cam is starting to get into it a little. “I don’t think ‘Talk more’ is exactly right. How about ‘Listen to each other’ instead? I don’t think I did a great job listening to you at Mutiny, even when we _did_ talk. That’s really the most important thing, right?”

“Yeah, I hear that!” Donna looks at Cam and grins, and Cam snorts at Donna's awful joke. “But you’re right; it is. And I didn’t do terribly well with that, either.” Donnacrosses off “Talk more” and replaces it with “Listen to each other.”

“This sounds corny, but I want us to build things that we love, not just stuff that will make more money, or be more popular, or whatever.” Cam is getting a little more animated with every sentence. “I mean, I know that it’s a business and that sometimes we’ll need to compromise, and sometimes things just don’t go the way we want them to go, but let’s _try_ to make things that we really love, at least.”

Donna nods. There were so many projects in her years as a VC that she didn’t love at all, and some others that she did love but couldn’t persuade the other partners to back for one reason or another. She too wants Phoenix, as much as possible, to be a labor of love.She adds “Make stuff we love” to the page.

Donna cocks her head, looking at what they’ve done so far. “Cam? Do you remember when we first talked about Phoenix in the Mutiny building, before there even _was_ a Phoenix?”

“Sure,” Cam says. “Of course I remember.”

“You said that this time we should really enjoy the ride. I want that on our list, too.”

“Ok. And how about one more thing?” Cam is looking at her a little shyly.

“What’s that?”

“I want it to say . . . ‘Remember what’s important.’ “ Cam isn’t quite meeting Donna’s eyes this time

Donna adds it without comment, wondering exactly what Cam means by it.For her, “Remember what’s important” goes without saying—it means, don’t ever put this business ahead of their friendship, their partnership, the way they had both done at Mutiny. Don’t ever forget again how much Cam means to her. She doesn’t know if Cam is thinking about that too, or if she’s thinking about something else entirely, and she doesn’t ask.

They both survey Phoenix’s newly created vision statement:

  * Listen to each other
  * Fill the world with music
  * Make stuff we love
  * Enjoy the ride
  * Remember what’s important



 “God,” Cam says, shaking her head. “We’re going to be the cheesiest company in the Valley.”

Donna nods. “Probably. But we’re going to have more fun than anyone else, so there’s that.”

 

**§§§**

They settle into a routine almost immediately.Donna blocks off 12:00 to 2:00 every afternoon at Symphonic for Phoenix, and she makes sure that her colleagues all understand that this time slot is to be considered absolutely sacrosanct. Cam comes into the office every day with lunch from a local sandwich shop for the two of them, and then they set up in a small conference room to eat and strategize.  
****

“Do you know what I was thinking about last night?” Cam says this before she swallows the bite of her tuna salad sandwich, so it comes out a little muffled.

“What?” Donna has been sorting through her stacks of paper, trying to formulate a business plan for the next couple of months. She looks at Cameron, enjoying seeing the little wheels in her head grind away.

“We’ve been thinking of this thing as just a digital juke box, but it really can be so much more.” Cam has the focused look that Donna knows so well, that always thrills her a little. She remembers how she felt when Cameron really put her mind toward making Community into something great; Donna doesn’t think she’d ever before experienced such pure, soaring joy.

“More how?”

“Well, what if we made something like Neighborhood was, only for music?It could be graphical, and we could have, I dunno, concert halls or something, for people to go to listen to different types of music.” Cam takes a sip of her Coke and looks at Donna expectantly.

Donna gets it right away. “Yeah! I see what you mean. So users could choose avatars, and then walk around and go to specific places. The wouldn’t have to all be concert halls, either.I mean, they could be for classical music, but . . .”

“Right,” Cam interrupts her. “But for Country, it could be some, like, a rodeo, and for Folk it could be a field with wildflowers, and for Classic Rock it could be a virtual Woodstock, and . . .”

“Yes!” Donna is really loving this. “And users could meet each other, talk about music, maybe create lists of their favorite songs and share them with each other . . . We could call it MusicLand, or something less goofy.”

Cam grins at her, then bends over to make notes, her sandwich long since forgotten. Donna watches her work, wishing that these lunch meetings of theirs would never end.

 

**§§§**

Very quickly, both of them realize that two hours crammed into the middle of Donna’s busy work day just doesn’t allow enough time for the explosion of ideas spewing forth from both of them. Donna suggests that they also meet at her house in the evenings. They can have dinner and then work as late as they both can stand it.

Cameron appears to like the idea. “That sounds good. But will you be ok? I mean, you have all that stuff at Symphonic, plus Haley . . . it’s a lot.”

Donna nods. “I’ll be fine. It _is_ a lot, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now.” She means it, and she can see that Cam knows it.

And so, this second part of their workday also becomes a routine: she, Cam, and Haley have some sort of dinner, and then Haley disappears into her room to do homework while Cam and Donna spread out on the dining room table and get to work.Donna, who gets up at 7:00 every morning, usually makes it until about midnight before seriously starting to fade. Cam, the night owl, always wants to keep going until 2:00 AM at least, and often she does, even after Donna’s gone to bed.

“It’s kind of a waste of time for you to keep driving all the way back to the Airstream in the middle of the night like you do,” Donna tells Cam at lunch, after about a week of these nocturnal work sessions.“We have a guest room, you know. We have Joanie’s room too, for that matter—it’s a four-bedroom house, plus an office. It’s huge. Why not just crash there when you work late?” Donna offers this casually, but she realizes as soon as she says it how very much she wants Cam to take her up on it.

Cam gives her a look that might have been something like longing, but it’s gone almost as quickly as it came. “That seems like it would be a big pain for you.”

Donna shakes her head, wishing she could tell Cam how _opposite_ of a pain it would be. “It wouldn’t. It’s a guest room that we never use—when do I have guests? It would be better for the business; you could work later and sleep longer in the morning.” That sounds practical, Donna thinks, waiting a little more intently for Cam’s response than might strictly be necessary.

Cam is nodding. “Yeah, it probably would be. Ok, if you’re sure.” She’s flushing a little and looking oddly happy.

Donna smiles. “I’m sure.” She hunches back over her stack of papers, studying them intently as she tries to ignore the warm feeling flooding through her.

 

**§§§**

In no time at all, Donna’s guest room is transformed into “Cameron’s room.”Cam gradually fills the dresser with jeans and t-shirts. and her CDs begin migrating from the Airstream to the room’s small desk. Donna can tell that Cam is really making an effort to be neater than she usually is. Although Donna finds her attempt a little touching, she doesn’t care about any of it. Her house feels alive again in a way that it hasn’t for a long, long time, and the lived-in nature of the guest room just makes it even more so.

During the week, they don’t see each other much more than they had before: Cameron goes to bed after Donna does, and Donna leaves for work in the morning before Cam wakes up. But nonetheless, something about the arrangement energizes Donna, makes the long days seem like mere trifles. She hasn’t, she often thinks to herself, felt like this since Mutiny.

Donna checks in to say good night to Haley one night before heading off to bed herself, and she finds her daughter wide awake and frowning over a C++ textbook.

“Hey, bug. It’s after midnight.” Donna smiles at Haley fondly.

Haley glances up. “I just need to finish these last couple of pages. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

Donna doubts that but doesn’t push it. “Was Cam helping you with it tonight? I saw you guys looking at something together before dinner.”

Haley nods. “I was just having trouble debugging something, and she figured out the problem right away. Cam’s pretty amazing with this stuff.”

“She is.” Donna hesitates for a moment. “Are you ok with her being here so much? I’m sorry I didn’t check in with you before I told her she could crash here when we work late.”

Haley stares at her. “Of course I’m ok with it.It’s great, having her here. It’s so . . . different from the way it was.”

Donna looks a little startled, and Haley blushes. “I didn’t meant that the way it sounded. But I really like it that Cam’s here. It’s like she’s part of our family now.”

Donna sits down next to Haley on the bed, nudging her shoulder. “I like it too.”Donna isn’t surprised to hear that Haley is pleased about this makeshift little family of theirs; she has seen a little of the sadness lifting from her daughter every evening that Cam has been there for dinner. Cam has always been close to Joanie, but the bond that Haley and Cameron have developed over the past year is something Donna finds both special and endearing.

Donna sees that Haley is regarding her thoughtfully. “It’s great that the two of you made up, isn’t it? You really seem to love doing Phoenix with her.”

“I do love it.” Donna feels as though she loves everything these days: Phoenix, Symphonic, Cam, Haley, and everything else in her life. It’s almost a little scary, actually.

 

**§§§**

Weekends, when Donna doesn’t have to rush to Symphonic, are the best. On Friday, knowing that she won’t need to go into the office the next morning, Donna feels free to stay up as late as Cam does to work on Phoenix. She sleeps in the next morning to make up for it, waking up around the same time as Cameron. Then she, Cam, and Haley have brunch, a mishmash of foods that don’t really go together but that all of them love.Saturdays are generally a long Phoenix work session with breaks for TV and video games. Sunday starts with another brunch, one for which Donna, fortified by Saturday, usually manages to prepare actual breakfast food.  
****

On one of these Saturdays when brunch is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and store-bought chocolate cake, Haley asks if she can invite a friend over for brunch tomorrow.

Donna looks at her daughter. “Of course. Do I know the friend?”

Haley is suddenly very busy scraping the last of her cake off of the plate. “Nope. She’s my chem lab partner. Her name’s Jordan.”

Cameron looks at Donna and givers her a little thumbs up sign, then quickly looks back at her own food before Haley can notice. Donna shakes her head, amused and fond of both of them.

Haley is now clearly changing the subject. “What are you guys going to do today, besides work?”

Donna looks at Cameron. “What are we going to do today, Cam?”

Cameron laughs. “Work. _Besides_ work? What on earth does that even mean?”

Donna smiles, but she suddenly _does_ want to do something with Cameron today that isn’t just about work. “We could . . . go to a movie, maybe. Everything is going so well with Phoenix right now; we’re actually ahead of schedule. We can afford to take an afternoon off.”

Cameron is looking at her now, a little puzzled, as if the concept of an afternoon off doesn’t compute. 

“I guess we could, if you want to.What’s playing?”

Donna hesitates, wondering what Cam will think of this. “There’s this new indie movie that just came out called _Before Sunrise_. I kind of want to see it.”

Cam regards Donna thoughtfully. “That’s the love story one, right? About the two people in Vienna?”

Donna nods, a little nervously, waiting for Cam to make a joke about it.

The joke doesn’t come.Cam shrugs.“It’s no _Santa Claus Conquers the Martians_ , but sure, let’s do that. Why not?”

Haley gives her a strange look, and Donna smiles.

 

**§§§**

Cameron is the one who starts the habit of leaving notes for Donna to find on weekday mornings. Real notes, not emails, scribbled on folded-up sheets of legal notepad pages. At first, the notes are just about the project:

_I finally figured out a really good design for MusicLand’s town square. I’ll show you it at lunch._

Then came the occasional joke:

_Hey! Were you planning to sleep forever and leave me with all the work here, as usual?_

And once in a great while, there would be something personal and heartfelt, the sort of thing that Cam might find hard to say to her in person. These rare notes would make Donna’s breath catch as she read them, and that feeling of sudden breathlessness would stay with her all morning:

_Just wanted to say how great everything is right now. Thanks for letting me crash here with you guys. I appreciate it._

Donna starts leaving notes back for Cam to find when she wakes up, trying to achieve the same combination of business, laughter, and little flickerings of emotion that Cam has been somehow managing. There’s so much she wants to say to Cam right now, and so much that she doesn’t think she can or ever will, that she’s happy to have this additional form of communication to try to make sense of it all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I guess all of us who have thought about Donna/Cam agree that the whole thing starts with Cameron's staying over at Donna's house a lot while they work on Phoenix. That's logical: Donna has a day job, so they have to work mostly at night, and Cam's trailer is far away. (Unlike others, I magnanimously gave Donna a guest room so Cam doesn't have to sleep in Joanie's room or on the couch. With that salary of hers, she can afford four bedrooms and an office!) I also love the idea that they start dating long before they actually get together officially or know that they're dating at all. :-)


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna and Cameron are observed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because every gay love story needs a heteronormative rom com B plot.

Tanya and Trip are playing a heated game on the Sony Playstation prototype in Symphonic’s incubator room when they see Cameron enter, loaded down with several bags of tacos.

“Hey, guys,” she says, walking over to them. “I brought extra. What do you want? I’ve got fish, beef, or veggie.”

Trip pauses the game, takes a beef taco from the bag, and starts eating it right away, mumbling his thanks through pieces of corn tortilla. Tanya, however, hesitates. “Are you sure you have enough?”

“Totally. Take two if you want. Donna and I can’t eat all of these, but Taco Tony was running a special.” Cameron opens the bag a little wider for Tanya.

Tanya selects a fish taco. “Thanks. This looks great!” And it does—it’s lunch time, and she realizes that she forgot to eat breakfast in her rush to get an early start on the day.

“Anytime.” Cameron is turning her head to peer into Donna’s office, apparently noticing that the door is closed. “Is she in a meeting?”

Tanya looks up from her taco. “Oh, no—she’d kill us if we scheduled something during your Phoenix time. I think her conference call is just running a little long. I’m sure she’ll . . .”

At that moment, Donna’s door opens, and Donna herself steps out. Her face lights up when she sees Cameron. “Hey, sorry about that—East Coast call, and those are the worst. Oh, you brought tacos!”

“Well, it _is_ Tuesday.” Cameron is smiling at Donna, who laughs as though what Cam has just said is the funniest thing she’s ever heard.

“Let’s get going. I can’t wait to hear about how you think we can integrate the Town Square benches into the audio player.” Donna starts walking toward their usual conference room, Cameron following and saying something in response that Tanya can’t quite make out.

Trip watches them leave, and when he hears the click of the door closing, he turns to Tanya. “So what do you think is going on with those two?”

Tanya stares at him. “What do you mean?” She reflects, as she often has over the past few months, about how unlikely her friendship with Trip actually is. When she first met him, she wrote him off as a pompous, arrogant, privileged white boy. He still is that, but she’s been learning that there’s a little more to Trip than meets the eye.And, she has to admit to herself, he’s annoyingly cute.

“Don’t you think that Donna’s been acting different ever since they started working together on Phoenix?” Trip unpauses the game and continues playing, a beat before Tanya realizes what he’s doing. Dammit! Whatever redeeming qualities she’s been discovering about him, Trip is never one to fail to take advantage of any situation.

“I don’t think so,” Tanya says, not taking her eyes off the game. “I mean, she’s been different ever since she took over as managing partner back in September.” Tanya has really appreciated that one mark of that difference is that Tanya no longer has to concoct new recipes for Donna’s juice every morning.

“Well, sure, but it’s more than just that. I mean, didn’t you see that look she gave Cameron just now?” Trip taps the joystick rapidly, and Tanya counters with a move of her own.

“Just what exactly are you suggesting?” Tanya is pretty sure what he’s suggesting, and she’s also pretty sure he’s enjoying the visual. “They’re good friends, best friends. Women can have friendships without being romantically attracted to one another.” Even if, she thinks to herself but doesn’t say because she knows it’s not entirely fair, men probably can’t.

Trip pauses the game and looks at her. “I know that. I just happen to think that there’s something more there with those two.”

Tanya looks back at him. “Why do you think that? Just because Donna was happy to see Cameron?”But picturing it her mind now, Tanya thinks reluctantly that Trip might have a point. Donna did look _really_ happy, unusually so.

Trip shrugs. “It’s just a feeling.” When Tanya rolls her eyes at him, he adds, “Hey, I’m a sensitive guy. I know things. I play the guitar, and I have a gay brother.”

Tanya tucks the tidbit about Trip’s brother away as something to be mulled over later. “Let’s just finish the game and quit talking about this.” Privately, she decides to pay a little more attention to Donna and Cameron’s interactions, just to confirm that Trip is actually wrong about them.

 

**§§§**

A few hours later Tanya is in her office, deep into the latest issue of the _Mercury News_ , when she hears a tap on her door.She looks up and sees Donna.

“Sorry to interrupt. I just wondered how you’ve been doing on the rights negotiations for the MusicLand MP3 player.” Donna made Tanya the point person on that a couple of months ago, and Tanya knows what a vote of confidence that was in her abilities.

“Fine.Great, actually—I was going to tell you about it later this afternoon at our status update meeting. We’ve reached an agreement with Brandenburg, finally. He’s developed an MP3 encoder and player that’s going to be available for public download in the last quarter of this year, but he’s agreed to license it to Phoenix for MusicLand.” Tanya knows that securing this MP3 player was going to save Phoenix months of coding work, and she’s been looking forward to telling Donna about the win.

Donna’s reaction doesn’t disappoint her. Breaking into a big smile, she says, “Tanya! That’s excellent! Great, great work. I didn’t think we had a chance there.”

“He actually seemed pretty pleased that someone in the United States was interested in the MP3,” Tanya says. “Now we just have to hope that it’s the audio format that ultimately wins out. We’ll be able to switch formats if it doesn’t, but that’ll cost us time and money.”

“It’ll be fine,” Donna says, more confidently than Tanya would have expected. “It’s the best of the bunch, and I think that Brandenburg is really learning how to market himself.”

Tanya studies Donna for a moment, thinking that, indeed, she’s never seen her looking so buoyant and relaxed. But was that because she’d just had a productive working session, or because of the good news about the MP3 player, or because of something else? And then, as Donna walks away from her office, Tanya hears her . . . _humming_? She listens intently . . . yes, certainly humming, and it sounds suspiciously like [“Maybe This Time,” ](http://www.heatherweb.com/stuff/fade/maybe.mp3) from Cabaret.That _is_ a little weird, Tanya reluctantly admits to herself.

 

**§§§**

The next day, Tanya is having lunch with Trip at a cafe near the office. “So, it’s _possible_ that there might be a little more between Donna and Cameron than friendship,” Tanya says, taking a bite of her chef salad. “I was watching them today when Cameron came for their meeting, and they did seem to be, I don’t know, laughing a little more at each other’s jokes than friends normally do.”

“Aha! I knew you’d come around.” Trip smugly swallows his bite of cheeseburger, and Tanya reflects that only Trip can look smug eating a burger.

“I haven’t come around. I just think it’s one possibility in a universe of possibilities.” Tanya watches Trip swallowing and curses herself for finding it slightly attractive. She sighs inwardly. Her world would be a lot better, she thinks, if _she_ were attracted to other women instead of Neanderthal-like men.

Trip wipes his mouth and looks at her. “So, what do you know about their story? I was in that MISC session with them last year, and it seemed as though they were one short step away from ripping each other to shreds.” He grins, clearly finding the memory a pleasant one.

Tanya remembers; she wasn’t there, but that little encounter made the rounds of office gossip almost before Donna had exited the auditorium. “I’m not sure—a lot of it happened before I came to work here. All I know is that they were partners at Mutiny and that Donna forced Cameron out over an argument about the IPO. Then Cameron went to Tokyo and stayed there for seven years. And now she’s back, and they seem like they’ve gotten past it all, somehow.”

Trip snorts. “Yeah, it certainly seems as though they have.” Tanya tosses a napkin at him, which he expertly ducks.

 

**§§§**

A few days later, Tanya hears the murmurings coming from Donna and Cameron’s conference room growing more animated. After awhile, Donna opens the door and sticks her head out. Seeing Tanya in the bullpen, she calls out to her.

“Tanya? Do you have a minute? We need you to settle an argument.” Donna motions with her chin for Tanya to come into the conference room.

“Sure.” Despite the fact that she’s helping out with the business end of the project, Tanya has never been asked to one of these daily Donna/Cameron meetings. She’s both pleased and a bit intimidated at the prospect.

Cameron is talking as Tanya enters the room. “I’m telling you, it’s not worth it.”

Donna is shaking her head. “And I’m telling you, you’re not thinking big enough. Let’s see what Tanya has to say.”

Cameron is tapping the table impatiently. “Ok, sure, let’s do that. Hey, Tanya, do you think we should try to offer live streaming in our first release?”

“What do you mean by live streaming?You mean, streaming a real concert or something like that over the Internet?” Tanya knows that Donna and Cameron will be hosting digital music on their own server, but facilitating the streaming of live music is something else again; it’s barely been attempted, let alone done commercially.

Cameron nods, and Donna tilts her head. “We really want to know what you think, since you’ve been doing a lot of research in the field, too.”

“Well, it’s ambitious,” Tanya answers carefully. “I think it would be great, and I think it’s definitely something that we should be aiming toward. But the technology might not be there for another year or so, and we don’t want to scare off potential MusicLand users if things aren’t working quite right. Maybe we should save that for a later release?”

Cameron nods triumphantly. “That’s what I’ve been saying.And hey, when I want to be more cautious than Donna does, you all should sit up and pay attention.”

Cameron smiles at Donna, who finally smiles back. “Ok, maybe I’m getting a little carried away. But I want to make sure we get there, someday. Imagine letting people hear live concerts who can’t get there themselves.” Donna’s eyes are getting that dreamy, unfocused look that they sometimes do when she talks about MusicLand and the many possibilities of the future.

Tanya thinks she sees an oddly tender look flash across Cameron’s face as she regards Donna, but it’s gone so quickly that she wonders if she imagined it. “We’ll definitely want to do it eventually, but let’s make sure we get this first release out the door before someone else beats us to it.”

“Yeah,” Donna sighs. “You’re right, of course. We’ve been aiming for a release of the pilot web site by the end of the summer. We should stick to that and not let feature creep derail us.”

Cameron looks at her mockingly. “And who was just saying that a second ago?Why, could it have been . . . me?”

“Shut up,” Donna gives Cameron a look laced with enough affection that Tanya wonders if she should be embarrassed by it. As if she were thinking the same thing, Donna suddenly seems to realize that Tanya is still in the room. “Thanks for your help, Tanya.We appreciate it.”

Tanya nods and starts to leave, thinking hard about Donna, Cameron, and Trip’s thoughts about the two of them.

 

**§§§**

Tanya asks Trip if he wants to take a walk outside to get some air, and he accepts instantly.

“So what’s up?” Trip asks as they stroll toward a local park. “Have you finally given in to my many charms?”

Tanya rolls her eyes at him. “No, but I think I might have given in to your theory about Donna and Cameron.”

“Sure you have, because I’m always right. I have laser-sharp gaydar. It never fails me.” Trip looks about as self-satisfied about his alleged gaydar as he does about just about everything else. Tanya wonders, as she so often does, why she enjoys his company as much as she seems to.

“The thing is,” Tanya continues, “I don’t think _they_ know it, so it’s probably irrelevant. I mean, if they see each other as good friends, than that’s what they are.” She actually thinks it’s a shame, because Donna and Cameron would make a nice couple.

“They’ll figure it out eventually.” Trip seems confident.He notices a bench and points at it, looking at Tanya inquiringly. She nods, and they both sit down.

“How do you know? As far as I know, both of them are straight. It’s not as though it’s an option that’s going to pop into their heads.” Tanya really can’t imagine how it could really happen, even though she kind of wishes that it were possible.

Trip looks suddenly serious, not smug or mocking at all. “I know because, believe it or not, I’m a romantic. If two people are right for each other, it’ll happen; it can’t _not_ happen. And I have a feeling that Donna and Cameron are right for each other.” He makes direct eye contact with Tanya as he says this, and suddenly she sees the part of Trip that makes it clear to her why she likes him.

“Maybe you’re right.” Tanya hopes that Trip _is_ right, and for some reason, the power of his gaze makes her feel that it might actually come to pass.

Suddenly, earnest Trip is gone, and smugly mocking Trip has taken over once again. “Why don’t we have a little bet on it?”

“What kind of bet?” Tanya asks warily, sighing a little.

“A holiday bet.The next holiday coming up is St. Patrick’s Day. After that there’s April Fool’s Day, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I’ll pick a holiday by which I think they’ll be a couple, and you pick another one. If they’re a couple on or before my holiday, I win. If they’re one on or before your holiday, you win. And if they’re not a couple at all when both holidays pass, nobody wins.” Trip is looking at her expectantly.

“That’s a pretty complicated bet,” Tanya says. “And how will we even know it if they do become a couple? It’s not as though they’d be likely to announce it right away.”

“I’d know.” Trip is looking at her with a half-smile that she finds oddly endearing.

“You would? That famous gaydar again?”

“Exactly.” Trip is arching an eyebrow at her for emphasis.

“And what would the prize be?” Tanya wonders if they’re engaging in some form of flirtation, and she tries to put that thought out of her mind.

“Dinner. Loser buys.” Trip’s smile is broader now.

Tanya sighs. “Trip . . . I’ve told you before, I’m not going to date my boss.” Much as I might want to, she adds mentally to herself. But her career at Symphonic is too important for her to risk.

Trip looks right at her. “And I’ve told _you_ before—I’m not your boss, Donna is. I have absolute no say over your performances appraisals or promotion decisions. No power dynamics here at all.”

“Even so. I just don’t think it’s a good idea.” Tanya says it firmly, certain that this decision is the right one; she just doesn’t need that sort of hassle in her life at the office.

Trip shrugs. “I know, and I respect that, even though people do date each other in the workplace. It isn’t always a train wreck.”

Tanya interrupts him. “It’s a train wreck often enough for me to give it a hard pass.”

“Ok, as I said, I respect that. But this is just dinner, not a date. We have lunch together. Why would this be any different?” Trip, Tanya can see, is trying hard to be logical and persuasive.

“You know why it’s different. It’s _dinner_. But whatever, we’ll just make sure that we both know it isn’t a date. Yes, I’ll bet with you. What holiday do you want?”

Trip thinks about it. “Well, I don’t think it’ll happen really soon, but to be safe, I choose Halloween. You can pick an earlier or a later holiday.”

“Thanksgiving.” At Trip’s head tilt, she explains, “It just seems like a time for new beginnings.”

Trip nods. “Ok.So if they’re together by the end of Halloween night, I win. If they’re together by the end of Thanksgiving, you win. Hey, I’ll even give you all of Thanksgiving weekend, because I’m a generous guy.”

Tanya smiles. “You’ve got yourself a wager, sir.” She catches Trip’s eye and finds that he’s looking right into hers. The rest of the year, she thinks to herself, will be very interesting for all of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won't apologize for this one--I love Tanya, I think Trip has potential as a character, and I like the idea of the two of them together gossiping about Donna and Cameron. Since we're in a post #metoo era, I invented a management structure for Symphonic similar to the way it works in law firms: Tanya is Donna's associate, and as such Trip isn't her boss. He's a doofus, but he's not a predator asking for sex in exchange for professional advancement.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron cooks.

Joanie comes home the end of March with presents for everyone, Cameron included, and she seems happy to spend her first night home regaling everyone with stories and enjoying pizza and beer with the family. Buzzed and drowsy, Cam thinks to herself that if the rest of her life were spent simply watching Donna and her daughters laugh together and love each other, she’d be ok with it. Joanie seems older, more self-assured, more grounded. Seeing the world has obviously been good for her.

Later that night, after Haley has disappeared into her room and Donna is inside cleaning up, Cameron and Joanie sit next to each other by the pool.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Cameron says, meaning it. “We’ve all missed you.” Cameron knows that Joanie needed to get away, but her absence was a hole in all of their lives, one that had caught Cameron by surprise with its depth. Before Joanie left, Cam hadn’t quite realized what a real friend Joanie had actually become to her.

“Yeah. Me, too.” Joanie takes a sip of her beer and smiles at Cameron. “I just . . . it seemed time, you know? And it’s been almost a year since Dad . . . I thought I should be home for that, for mom and Haley.” Her voice catches a little, and Cam realizes that Joanie needs to be home with her family right now just as much as she thinks that her family needs her. It’s all the same thing in the end, after all.

Cam looks at Joanie affectionately, thinking to herself that this kid can’t genuinely be called a dick any longer; she really _has_ grown up in the past year. _Hell, so have I_ , she thinks to herself. And growing up is a lot less weird for an eighteen-year-old than it is for someone thirty-three.

Cameron is startled out of her reverie to hear Joanie saying something that sounds a lot like “thank you.”

“Thank me for what?” Cam can’t imagine what Joanie might be thanking for, and she wonders if she has missed some key part of the conversation.

“You know . . . for being here. For not leaving. For taking care of Haley and mom.” Joanie isn’t completely looking at Cameron, but Cam can tell from her voice how much she means it.

“Oh, Joanie . . . you’ve got it backwards. I haven’t done anything except hang around here when I have a perfectly good trailer of my own. They’ve . . . I mean . . .” Cameron trails off, unable to explain to Joanie just how much the past three months have meant to her, how she’s happier now than she’s been for years, how these evenings with Donna and Haley have become everything to her.

Joanie seems to get it, though. “Maybe, but I can see how much less uptight my mom is now, and Haley isn’t walking around looking as though the world has just ended. You’ve helped whether you know it or not.” Joanie hesitates, and then adds, “I’m glad you’re not fighting with my mom anymore.”

“Me, too.” Cameron utters this a little more strongly and quickly than she might have preferred. She shifts a little, “We’re both really excited about Phoenix, and about this whole MusicLand idea.”

Joanie gives her a half-grin, as if she knows perfectly well that the complicated _something_ between Donna and Cameron right now goes far beyond their business. But, obligingly, she lets it go. “Yeah, Haley’s been telling me about it. MusicLand seems really, really cool. I can’t wait until you launch it. How much music will you have available?”

They talk about Phoenix until Donna and Haley come outside with ice-cream sundaes for everyone.

 

**§§§**

A week later, Cameron notices that Donna is a little quiet and distracted during their lunch meeting, and she decides to ask her about it. “Hey . . . are you ok?”

Donna bites her lip, nods, and then shrugs. “Yeah, sorry. It’s just . . . it’ll be a year since Gordon died next week, and it’s sort of been on my mind.”

Cameron has never really focused on specific calendar dates—she misses Gordon all the time, and she won’t miss him any more a year from his death than she does right now—but she’s not surprised to find that anniversaries of things are important to Donna. “Joanie mentioned that, too.”

“She did?” Donna looks surprised. “She hasn’t said anything about it to me. I’m pretty sure that Haley’s been thinking about it, but we haven’t talked about it either.”

Cameron reflects on the odd fact that her life is much better since Gordon died, which makes her feel a little guilty. But even though she loves working on Phoenix with Donna, the fact that Gordon has disappeared from everything forever, and irrevocably, will never stop hurting. “Are you . . . going to do something that day?”

Donna shrugs. “I wish I knew what was right. I know it’s going to be tough for all of us, and I’m sure it’ll be better if we talk about it. I guess I’ll figure it out.” Donna’s sadness is so palpable that Cameron aches to do something—anything—to make it go away. Since she can’t come up with what that thing might be, she just nods and turns back to her sketch of the MusicLand home page.

 

**§§§**

That night, Cameron is unable to fall asleep for a long time. She thinks about the day she and Donna packed up Gordon’s house and finally forgave each other for the past. She remembers how eating Bos’s chili with everyone that night was like a balm on her newly healing wound; she finally felt part of a family, a real one, nothing at all like the one with which she shared actual blood. This strange, cobbled-together family had nothing to do with blood at all; it was just . . . love. She finally falls asleep, enveloped in the feeling from that night.

When Cameron wakes the following morning, it all seems perfectly clear; on the anniversary of Gordon’s death, she wants—she _needs_ —somehow to recreate that feeling for Donna and Haley and Joanie.Cameron realizes what a weirdly out-of-character notion this is for her—she, who has never managed to remember anyone’s birthday or any holiday, a fact that always drove Joe crazy even as he patiently tried to overlook it. But this seems different and oddly urgent. She has no idea how she’s going to pull it off, or exactly what she’s going to do, but she’s certain that she has to make it happen. Ordinarily, she would ask Bos for help, and she knows that he’d be happy to make his chili again for all of them. But since Bos and Diane are traveling through Italy at the moment, Cameron is on her own.

Cameron mulls over the problem for the rest of the day with half of her mind as the other half engages in debugging MusicLand’s MP3 player. Suddenly, she remembers that one of the many conversations that she and Donna had while driving from Florida to California was about their favorite foods. Miraculously, she recalls that Donna’s is a dish called “Chicken Marbella”; that Joanie’s favorite is a coconut custard pie; and that Haley’s is Bagel Bites.

Making a dinner with everyone’s favorite foods might be the right thing here. _Well, those last two are easy_ , she thinks. _I can just buy a coconut custard pie and Bagel Bites_. So that takes care of the appetizers and the dessert, but the main course is something else again. To say that Cameron doesn’t cook is an understatement of vast proportions. Her idea of making hot food is exclusively limited to what can be managed in a microwave, and even that happens rarely. When she’s on her own (and she’s hardly been on her own, she has to admit, since she and Donna started working on Phoenix), cereal for dinner is just about all the effort that she cares to put into meal preparation.

That afternoon, Cameron does what she always does when faced with a problem: she turns to the Internet for help. After typing www.webcrawler.com into Netscape’s address bar, she puts “chicken marbella” into the search box. The first hit that comes up tells her that recipe can be found in something called _The Silver Palate Cookbook_. It’s not as convenient as finding the actual recipe online, but maybe she can work with this. She leaves the Airstream and gets into her truck, heading for the Barnes and Noble in the center of town. She has just enough time to find the book before she’s due at Donna’s that evening.

 

**§§§**

When Cameron wakes up the next morning, the first thing she does is go out to her truck to retrieve _The Silver Palate Cookbook_ , which she’d had no trouble finding and purchasing the day before. Donna has long since left for work, Haley is in school, and Joanie is still sleeping. Cam quickly locates the recipe for Chicken Marbella and studies it with growing anxiety:

**************

**INGREDIENTS**

½cup olive oil

½cup red wine vinegar

1cup pitted prunes

½cup pitted Spanish green olives

½cup capers, with a bit of juice

6bay leaves

1head of garlic, peeled and puréed

½cup fresh oregano, chopped, or 1/4 cup dried oregano

2teaspoons of salt

¼teaspoon freshly ground pepper

2chickens, 3 1/2 to 4 pounds each, quartered

1cup dry white wine

1cup brown sugar

2tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley

**PREPARATION**

Step 1

In a large bowl, combine the olive oil, vinegar, prunes, olives, capers and juice, bay leaves, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper. Add the chicken pieces and turn to coat. Refrigerate overnight.

Step 2

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Arrange the chicken in a single layer in a shallow roasting pan; spoon the marinade over it evenly. Pour in the wine and sprinkle the chicken with the brown sugar.

Step 3

Bake until the thigh pieces yield clear yellow juice when pricked with a fork, 50 to 60 minutes, basting two or three times with the pan juices once the chicken begins to brown. (When basting, do not brush off the sugar. If the chicken browns too quickly, cover lightly with foil.)

Step 4

Transfer the chicken pieces to a warm serving platter and top with the prunes, olives and capers; keep warm. Place the roasting pan over medium heat and bring the pan juices to a boil. Reduce to about 1/2 cup. Strain into a heatproof bowl, add the parsley and pour over the chicken.

**************

Cameron reads through the list of ingredients several times, trying to quell her rising panic. At least she knows what all of these ingredients _are_ , which should count for something. She’s especially happy to see that the dish has capers in it; Cam still remembers Donna’s eye roll at the many, many jars of capers that she found in Gordon’s house while cleaning out his kitchen. _Capers are perfect_ , she thinks.

When she’s sure she won’t hyperventilate, Cameron reads the preparation instructions. She sees that the first step is just mixing stuff together and pouring it over the chicken. That didn’t seem that hard, but she realizes that she’ll need to do it after Donna goes to bed and hope that she doesn’t notice a big bowl of chicken in her refrigerator the next morning. (The chances of it all working out that way aren’t bad, she realizes, because Donna never has anything other than coffee in the morning before leaving for Symphonic.)

Reading through everything, Cameron starts to feel a little less terrified. She thinks everything seems doable except for the very last part, where words like “reducing” and “strain” seem potentially beyond her. But if she actually gets that far, she’s sure she can wing the rest of it. 

 

**§§§**

The night before what Cameron has been privately thinking of as Chicken Marbella D-Day rather than the anniversary of Gordon’s death, Donna goes to bed early. Cameron knows that this is because Donna hasn’t been able to focus much on work all week, but she counts it as a bit of luck nonetheless. It hasn’t gone perfectly smoothly up to this point—Cameron has had to make more than a few panicky posts over the week to the rec.food.cooking newsgroup to ask questions and get advice, and she had needed to visit three supermarkets before finding all of the ingredients—but in the end, she has the bowl of marinade finished. She is just about to put the chicken into it when Joanie (who has been out for the evening with friends) comes home. Before Cameron can do anything about it (and how do you hide two cut-up chickens, after all?), Joanie is right next to her.

Joanie looks at the chicken, the bowl of marinade, and then at Cameron. “What are you doing?”

Cameron sighs.Nothing to do here but tell the truth, she supposes. “I’m . . . making this chicken thing. It’s supposed to sit in this stuff overnight. It’s for tomorrow. I just thought . . .”

Joanie stares at her. “You’re . . . cooking? Do you, like, know how?”

Cameron thinks she should probably be offended at that, but then decides that it’s a reasonable enough question. “Sort of. I figured it out, with some books and bulletin boards and stuff. It’s called Chicken Marbella. Your mom once mentioned that it was her favorite, and I just wanted you guys to have a good dinner tomorrow, because of . . .”

Another stare, and then a look of warmth. “Cameron, that’s totally . . . nice. She’s going to . . . thanks.” Joanie is a little awkward in her sincerity.

Cam flushes. “Let’s hope that it’s edible.” She puts the chicken into the bowl of marinade, covers it with Saran Wrap, and pushes it as far back into the refrigerator as she can.

“Even if it isn’t, it will be.” Joanie is smiling at her, and Cam hopes that she’s right. She decides to set her alarm so she’d be up when Donna is, to try to keep her from opening the refrigerator and discovering the chicken.

 

**§§§**

The next morning, Donna looks up with surprise when Cameron appears in the kitchen at 7:45. “Hey. Couldn’t sleep?”

Cameron yawns. “No, not really.” She looks at Donna, who clearly is the one who actually couldn’t sleep the night before. She looks pale and drawn, and suspiciously as if she’s been crying. Before she can stop and consider what she’s doing, Cameron takes Donna’s hand. Donna squeezes it without saying anything. They stay like that until they both hear Haley clattering outside the kitchen.

Haley pours herself some cereal without looking at either Cam or Donna. When Donna goes over to give her a hug, Haley seems to melt against her. “I know,” Cameron hears Donna murmur to her daughter. It’s such an intimate moment that she wonders if she should be sitting here at all.

After Haley leaves for school, Donna turns back to Cameron. “Cam, would it be ok if we skipped our office session today? I just . . . I’m not really up for it, not today, not in the office, anyway. We can do some work tonight.”

Cam feels a little awkward, suddenly thinking that maybe she should let Donna have some privacy tonight with her daughters. She could, after all, just leave the chicken for them and spend the night in her Airstream. “If you’d rather be alone, that’s totally cool. I understand.”

Donna jerks her head up to stare at her. “Don’t be crazy. Of course we want you here. It’s where you belong, and not having you there would make everything worse.” Donna says it so quickly and easily that Cameron believes her, and it makes her choke a little. 

“Ok.” Cameron doesn’t look at Donna, but she feels a hand on her shoulder.

 

**§§§**

Early that afternoon, Cameron is working at the computer in Donna’s home office, taking a couple of hours off the cooking project to finish a block of code. She’s deep into it when Haley comes home from school and startles her.

“Cam? Joanie told me that you’re cooking everyone dinner tonight. I was wondering if maybe I could help? What are you making with the chicken?” Haley looks at Cameron expectantly.

“With the chicken? Well, I sort of wanted to make everyone’s favorite foods, so we’re having Bagel Bites as appetizers and coconut custard pie for dessert, since your mom told me that those were yours and Joanie’s favorites. I bought those both yesterday . . . wait, is that right?” Cam panics for a minute when it suddenly looks as though Haley is about to cry.

“That’s . . . that’s right. Cameron . . . thanks so much. Like, for everything, not just for this.” Haley can’t seem to say anything else. Cam just nods, looking away and waiting for Haley to speak again.

A moment later, Haley does, and she’s back to the subject of the menu. “But, like, are you making anything with the chicken?Like rice? I know how to make rice.”

Cameron feels like smacking herself upside the head. Of _course_ she couldn’t just throw a pile of chicken at everyone without _other stuff_. Jesus, it’s lucky that the girls found out about all this. “That would be great. You can be on the rice committee.Do . . . do we have rice?”

Haley grins. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go out and get some if we don’t. I think the chicken and rice is all we need, especially if we’re having Bagel Bites and dessert.”

After Haley leaves for the store, Cameron looks at her watch. It’s 4:00, and she figures that Donna will be home by 6:00. She’ll put the chicken in just before that, so they’ll have enough Bagel Bite time before dinner. She sighs, exhausted. Are there really people out there who cook dinner for families every single day?

 

**§§§**

Cameron puts the chicken into the oven just as she hears Donna’s BMW pulling into the driveway. Haley is busily measuring out rice, and Joanie has been given the job of making sure that the Bagel Bites are done and arranged on plates. Cameron watches the girls, pleased that this dinner seems to be distracting them a bit from what should be a very sad evening. But they both appear to be enjoying themselves a little, and Cam considers that a serious win.

Walking into the kitchen, Donna stares at the domestic scene before her. “What’s all this?”

Haley looks up from the rice. “Cameron made dinner for us, and we’re just helping.”

Donna just stares at her daughter. “Cameron did . . . what?” She turns around to stare at Cam, who is looking guiltily at the oven.

“I just wanted to . . . for tonight, you know. It’s no big deal.” Cameron is starting to get a little uneasy about the way Donna is looking at her. It’s just dinner, after all!

At that moment, Joanie turns around to look at her mother and Cameron. “She made all of our favorite things—Bagel Bites and coconut custard pie, and Chicken Marbella!”

If Donna had looked shocked before, she now looked positively stunned, so much so that Cameron feels the need to explain herself. “You mentioned all that stuff when we were driving back here, remember? And it didn’t turn out to be that hard to make, not really, and it had capers, and it made me remember Gordon’s jars of capers . . .” Cameron is starting to feel a little ridiculous. Donna still hasn’t said anything, and it’s making her nervous.

All of a sudden, Cameron realizes (to her horror) that Donna is crying, and not just an eyes-filling-with-tears sort of thing—she’s really crying, with little gasping noises as she tries to hold it in and isn’t able to stop. And then Cameron feels Donna’s arms tight around her, sobbing onto her t-shirt and saying something about being sorry for doing that. Tentatively, Cameron puts her arms around Donna and hugs her back a little clumsily. They stay like that for a full minute as Donna tries to pull herself together.

When she does, she just looks at Cameron with absolute wonderment. “I can’t believe that you remembered all that, and I can’t believe you did it. It must have taken ages. And the capers are . . . perfect.” Donna puts her hand on Cameron’s face for a moment, and Cam shivers a little at her touch.

Haley looks up from the stove at that moment. “Hey, I’m making the rice. Where’s my hug?” Donna laughs and goes over to embrace her.

 

**§§§**

When they all sit down to start on the appetizers, Cameron is amazed to see a second platter next to the one containing the Bagel Bites.

“It’s cornichons, mayonnaise, and bologna,” Joanie says, grinning at Cameron. “Haley told me how much you like it, and she and I thought that it was only fair that you had one of your favorites, too.”

“Thanks,” says Cameron, feeling a little prickly burn behind her eyes. _Gordon would have loved to see this_ , she thinks. _This would have made him really happy._

To her great relief, the Chicken Marbella appears to be a hit with everyone. Cameron tastes it tentatively and finds that she likes it; the sauce is delicious, and it’s perfect over Haley’s rice. Everyone is laughing and talking, and for some reason, nothing about any of it feels sad at all.

Donna taps on her glass, and they all look at her. “I just want to say something. It’s been a tough year for us all, and there’s been a lot of loss. But I’m just so grateful that all of you are here, right now, and that we’re all together. Thank you for making this day about the good things that we all still have.” She stops, unable to go on, and Cameron feels that same prickly burn again. When did it happen— _how_ did it happen?—that she’d become part of “all of you,” anyway?

Joanie is rolling her eyes and trying to look too cool to be moved. “God bless us, every one.” Donna laughs and squeezes her arm.

“So,” Joanie says, touching her mother’s hand in response. “I guess this is a good time to tell all of you that I have . . . news. I . . . I got into NYU. I’ll be going there this fall.”

Everyone stares, and Donna is the first to speak. “Honey, that’s . . . wonderful. When did you apply? How did it happen?”

Joanie shrugs. “I was sure last year that I wasn’t going to get in anywhere, but I sent in a photography portfolio with my application, and I wrote an essay that I think was pretty good. Anyway, they took me.” She smiles a little tentatively, but Cameron can see how much this means to her.

“Your father would have been really proud of you. I am, too.” Donna has tears in her eyes, and Cameron feels her own eyes welling up just a little. She’s proud of Joanie, too.

Joanie just looks at her mother, and then at Cameron as well. “Thanks for letting me figure stuff out these last six months. It was . . . really great.”

They all sit quietly for a few beats, thinking about the past year and savoring the moment together.

 

**§§§**

Haley and Cameron are loading the dishwasher after dinner when Haley says something so quietly that Cameron doesn’t quite catch it at first.

“I said, having you here has been great.” Haley is rinsing off a dish and not looking at Cam. “It’s really been, like, good for my mom. She’s hardly been in the pool since you guys started Phoenix.”

Cameron flushes a little. “I’m surprised she’s not getting sick of me.”

Haley turns to look at her. “She’s not getting sick of you, trust me. She loved this dinner tonight. It . . . it, like, meant a lot to her.”

Cam, recalling the look Donna had given her and the way her long embrace had felt, knows that Haley is right, and that knowledge fills her with that same warmth that she’d felt last year during Bos’s chili dinner. “I . . . I just wanted everyone to feel a little less sad today.”

Haley nods. “You’re good at doing that for us. You’ve made us all better.”

 _You’ve made me better, too_ , Cameron thinks but can’t quite say. Instead, she smiles at Haley, shrugs, and puts the dish she’s rinsing into the dishwasher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, domestic fluff isn't really my jam, but this is an important emotional beat both for Cameron and Donna. As for the Chicken Marbella itself, it *is* delicious, and I highly recommend it for your next potluck--easy to make, and the flavors blend nicely. THE SILVER PALATE COOKBOOK and THE NEW BASICS COOKBOOK by the same authors were super popular from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, but they're out of fashion now. If you make Chicken Marbella for an affair, it'll seem new and exotic! (Pro tip--use chicken thighs with skin and bone. You don't need to cut up actual chickens, as the recipe says to do and as poor Cameron dutifully did.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein television is watched and Donna reflects.

After the anniversary of Gordon’s death, Donna is conscious of yet another shift—subtle, maybe, but real nonetheless—in her relationship with Cameron. When Donna lets herself wonder about the shift, which isn’t often, she tells herself that it doesn’t have anything to do with Cameron’s Chicken Marbella, since she still feels a little silly about how much that touched her; it was, as Cameron herself said repeatedly, just dinner. People make dinner for each other every day, and it’s no big deal. But even as she repeats this to herself, Donna knows that it _was_ a big deal for Cameron even to remember the conversation about their favorite foods, much less to think of, plan, research, and actually execute a thing so far out of her comfort zone. The whole gesture was just so un-Cameron-like that it still takes Donna’s breath away to think about how much _caring_ went into it, and—even more—how unafraid Cameron was of showing that caring to Donna and Haley and Joanie.

Donna can’t say any of that to Cameron, because she knows that it would only embarrass both of them. But nonetheless, something about seeing how much Cameron cares has opened something up in Donna, givingher permission to allow some of her intangible feelings to bob a little closer to the surface. That emotional leveling up infuses her Cameron interactions with a sort of glowing haze, the implications of which she isn’t quite yet ready to face.

 

**§§§**

Donna _does_ admit to herself that the summer of 1995 is little short of perfect, since not admitting that would have been difficult. It’s very much, she often reflects, like the summer that she and Gordon built the Symphonic together, the summer that she had told Cameron was her favorite. Yet this one, she’s forced to concede to the annoying little voice of honesty inside of her, is even better because she and Cameron are working together with the sort of symbiosis that she and Gordon could never quite manage. It’s everything that was wonderful about Mutiny, without any of Mutiny’s frustrations. All of Donna’s old insecurities about not measuring up to Cameron seem to have mysteriously vanished, and it’s now as though the two of them are the left and right hemispheres of the same giant, pulsating brain.

Cameron’s original idea about MusicLand (the name seems to be sticking, despite the fact that both of them think that they should be able to come up with something snappier) has been the catalyst for some of the best creative work that either one of them has ever done. They already have a working prototype of their web site that surpasses anything that Donna could have imagined.User avatars will be able to move around MusicLand to different genre areas, each one a beautiful reflection of the graphical interface that lives inside of Cameron’s imagination. They can buy music and store it in their own personal libraries, organized however they like and accessible for playback each time they log in. Donna is particularly fond of the sharing feature that allows users to create lists of music and listen to them with their friends. Soon, although not as soon as the first release, they’ll be able to sell tickets to streamed live concerts in MusicLand’s virtual stadiums and concert halls.

Even Diane, who has been carefully silent about Phoenix since Donna returned from Florida, is impressed. She stops by Donna’s office one day after seeing the prototype site on the Symphonic server.

“I have to admit, what you and Cameron are doing is pretty special.” Diane’s words are sincere, and they mean more to Donna than she might have expected. She has been aware of a slight tension between herself and Diane as the only thing marring her golden summer at all.

“Thanks, I think so too. It’s mostly Cameron, though—she’s really flying with this thing.” Donna knows that Cam would disagree vehemently with this characterization, that she would say that MusicLand is turning out so well because she and Donna are working together so perfectly. And that might even be the truth. But for some reason, Donna wants Diane to think well of Cameron, of their partnership.

Diane looks at Donna and shakes her head slightly, but doesn’t say anything. “You seem . . . really happy. All of this double-duty work apparently agrees with you.”

“It does.” Donna wishes that she could say more to Diane, but they’ve just never had that sort of a friendship.

Diane hesitates, looking as though she’d like to say more as well. “I’m glad you’re doing so well, you and Cameron. I know that I haven’t always been as supportive of that as I might have been.”

Donna is surprised that Diane is bringing this up explicitly; it’s normally a subject that both of them consciously avoid. “I understand. It’s always been . . . complicated.”

Diane smiles at her. “In my experience, many of the best things in life are complicated. Simplicity is vastly overrated.”

Donna nods, thinking to herself before she can stop the thought from bubbling up, _let’s hope so_.

 

**§§§**

Certain small changes that Donna really can’t explain occur over the course of that summer. For some reason,Donna starts staying up later at night and Cameron begins getting up earlier. By mid-July, their circadian rhythms seem to have become oddly harmonized. Donna wonders about it sometimes, pondering if it means something, or nothing at all. Its practical effect, however, is that yet another routine develops: they both knock off work at around 11:00, make some popcorn, and settle down on the couch to watch a couple of hours of Nick at Nite before going to bed.Donna, who has never much liked sitcoms and for whom a couple of hours of lost sleep might cost her dearly at Symphonic the next day, finds herself not caring a jot about any of that. She begins looking forward to these nights with Cameron more than she looks forward to anything else, even including their Phoenix working sessions.

One night, she and Cameron are deeply immersed in _I Love Lucy_ when Donna hears Cameron say something about Lucy and Ethel.

“What?” Donna, who has been focusing on the show, doesn’t quite catch it.

“I said, Lucy and Ethel are a lot more interesting together than either of them are with their husbands. It’s too bad the show didn’t do more with that.” Cameron grabs a handful of popcorn, stuffs it into her mouth, and looks at Donna as if to gauge her reaction.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. But I think they just assumed that everyone wanted as much Lucy and Ricky as they could get.” Donna takes some popcorn too, thinking about how often the female friends in most shows are more compelling to watch than the married couples.

“I hate Ricky. He’s a jerk.” Cam states this opinion as a long-held fact, and Donna can’t help agreeing. Ricky _is_ a jerk.

“Well, one trouble with all of these old shows is that they treat women like passive idiots. I mean, look at _Bewitched_ —I can’t believe how everyone thinks it’s perfectly ok that Darrin won’t let Samantha use her magic. If I had magic and Gordon didn’t want me to use it, that would have been the end of Gordon.” Donna is getting a little angry just thinking about it, and Cameron grins at her.

“Well, if you had magic, you could just make him disappear.” Donna chuckles at this, even though usually bringing up Gordon is a sad thing. But right now, the idea of turning a tyrannical Gordon into a toadstool seems hilarious to both of them.

“ _Bewitched_ still isn’t as bad as _I Dream of Jeanie_ —she calls him _master_! What’s that about?” Donna is starting to wonder why she even watches these shows. They’re all part of the Nick at Nite’s “block party summer”: _The Munsters_ on Monday, _I Love Lucy_ on Tuesday, _Bewitched_ on Wednesday, _I Dream of Jeanie_ on Thursday, and _Welcome Back, Kotter_ on Friday. And, Donna realizes, probably every one of them except maybe _Kotter_ is an anti-feminist nightmare, and _Kotter_ is really stupid.

Cameron laughs, yawns, and then settles back in the couch so that her head just touches Donna’s right shoulder. Donna remembers then why, of course, she watches these shows, why “block party summer” has become the highlight of her days.

 

**§§§**

Bemusedly, Donna has slowly become aware of just how popular Cameron is with many of the Symphonic employees. Sometimes Cameron will stay after their lunchtime meeting to play a video game with Trip, who appears to have loosened up considerably when AGGEK morphed into Symphonic. Sometimes Donna catches Cam chatting with Tanya, and once she even heard her deep in conversation with Elias, of all people, on the merits and drawbacks of internal network firewalls. Donna feels oddly proud of all this, even though she knows that’s a ridiculously inappropriate reaction to have.

Cameron scoffs when Donna brings it up to her late one night during their post-workday television downtime. “They don’t like me. They just like that I bring them tacos once in awhile.”

“The tacos don’t hurt, but trust me—they like you. I mean, Trip manages to behave like a normal person when you’re there, as if he has actual human thoughts and feelings.” Donna shakes her head, smiling. She doesn’t find Trip anywhere as annoying as she had before she became managing partner, but the old habit of talking trash about him is hard to break.

“Trip’s not so bad,” says Cameron, echoing Donna’s thoughts. “I think he just has an uptight work act that he puts on, but when he’s not doing it, he’s fine. He’s a pretty good gamer too,” she adds.

“Well, if he’s a good gamer, all is forgiven,” Donna says, snorting a little.

“I’m pretty sure that he has a thing for Tanya,” Cameron says.

Donna is surprised both by the fact itself and the idea that Cameron noticed it. She generally thinks of Cameron as too immersed in her work to pay attention to personal office interactions at all. “Huh. Really?”

Cam nods. “Really. I don’t think it’s going anywhere, but she could probably do worse. He’s less jerky than a lot of other guys are.”

 _Less jerky_ isn’t exactly high endorsement, but before Donna can think of a response, the commercial break ends, _Bewitched_ comes back on, and they turn their attention to Endora’s torturing of Darrin, which they both enjoy.

 

**§§§**

Another regular routine that develops over the summer—and another surprising one—is their weekly Saturday retreat to Cameron’s trailer. At first, Donna suggests it because she thinks that working on Phoenix in a different, tranquil location would be good for fostering their creative process, and Cameron agrees. But, as with much else over the course of the summer, the retreats soon blur the lines between work and not-work in a way that Donna finds delightful when she doesn’t think too much about it and a little anxiety-producing when she does.

Some of their best ideas come out of these retreats—how to integrate the MP3 player elegantly into the site, how to make some playlists private and others available to groups of users, what the virtual space for each musical genre should look like. But sometimes hours pass in which they don’t work at all: they go for walks through the woods, or laze around a picnic lunch talking about nothing and everything. Donna often reflects on the peculiarity of just how much more she and Cameron talk now than they used to, and that neither of them ever wants to discuss the fact that they’re talking so much, or that they’re spending more time with each other than they do with anyone else. It is, she thinks, both similar to their Mutiny days and entirely different.

Sometimes, especially if Haley and Joanie have weekend plans, they spend the night in the Airstream and don’t go back to Donna’s house until Sunday morning. Those Saturday nights generally mean campfires and beer, wine, or weed, depending on their mood. Usually they talk well into the early hours of the next morning, only crawling to bed in the Airstream when neither of them can form words into coherent sentences.On nights such as these, Donna lies in her table-turned-into-a-bed listening to Cameron’s soft snores, remembering their cross-country trip, and trying hard not to think about the future when the present is so perfect.

On one such Saturday night, Donna and Cameron have just finished a dinner of fried chicken and potato salad (supplied by Bos, who occasionally decides that both of them are in serious need of culinary care packages) and are sitting in comfortable silence, watching the fireflies and listening to the campfire’s crackling. Cameron is the first to speak. “I can’t believe we’re about to launch the site. It seemed like it was never going to happen, not for real.”

“I know.” Donna can’t really believe it, either. She knows that the site is good, that it’s the best work that she’s ever done. But as soon as it launches, its success will be largely out of their hands. What the public is going to make of MusicLand is anyone’s guess.

As if reading her mind, Cameron says, “I’m a little scared.”

Donna looks at her; Cam almost never says things like this. It’s another testament to how much both of them seem to have changed over the summer. “Scared about what?”

Cameron looks at her hands rather than at Donna. “It’s just . . . this is my first big thing since Pilgrim. I was so sure about that game. I really thought it was the best thing that I’d ever done, but nobody seemed to be able to _see_ it. Well, nobody except . . .” And then Cam, tilting her head and smiling a little shyly, _does_ look at Donna.

Donna smiles back at Cameron somewhat wistfully, thinking about Pilgrim. She’s never quite managed to tell Cam just how much that game meant to her, how it saved her when she felt as though she were drowning in loneliness. She tries to say some of that now. “Pilgrim was . . . beautiful. It was the best game I ever played. I think if Atari had released it, there would have been people who felt the way I did about it.” Donna stops, unable to say more than that.

Cameron’s face softens a little. “Thanks. But it kind of made me doubt everything, and I guess I never really got over it. I just . . . I really want people to like MusicLand. There’s so much there . . .”

Donna nods. It would kill both of them, she thinks, if MusicLand is released to a thundering silence. It’s more than just another project for both of them.

“We’ve done the best we can. What comes next—it isn’t up to us.” Donna thinks about what she just said, realizing how very little in life, at least so far, has really been up to her. The rest has just . . . happened.

 

**§§§**

MusicLand goes live at the end of August, the day after Joanie leaves for NYU. Donna finds herself so distracted by Joanie’s departure ( _Is her apartment safe enough? Does studying photography make any kind of sense? Will she ever be able to get a job? Will she be happy?_ ) that at first she finds she barely has the emotional space to consider the enormity of the launch of their web site. When she finally does, about a week later, she is almost shocked to realize how much better everything is going than she expected. Media journalists are writing about the launch and—more importantly—their reviews are overwhelmingly positive. There’s a long piece in _Wired_ covering not only MusicLand, but the whole history of Donna and Cameron’s partnerships, which thankfully seems to make a pretty good story now that they’ve come out intact on the other side.There are strong reviews in both _Byte_ and _PC Magazine_ , and the buzz on the music newsgroups is positive as well. Most importantly, users are subscribing, and those users are actually talking to one another and starting to purchase and share music.

Cameron is jubilant; Donna has never seen her looking happy in such an uncomplicated way. Cam spends hours on the site, interacting with users and trying to figure out what they can fix or enhance to make MusicLand even stickier.

“People love the playlist feature—lots of times they listen to a shared song, and then they buy it for themselves. It’s working out just the way we thought it would.” Cameron is beaming at Donna during one of their Symphonic lunches, and Donna finds herself entranced by the sight of it. She turns away to rummage through the sandwich bag before Cam has a chance to wonder why Donna is staring at her.

“We really need to get some more record labels on board. The users are happy now, but they’re not going to be happy for long if we don’t really increase our library.” Donna makes a mental note to talk to Tanya about how the label negotiations are going.

Cameron looks at her. “Sure, I know, but we’ve more than doubled in size every single day over the past two weeks. It’s a great start, isn’t it?” 

Donna nods, internally shaking her head at herself. Cautious is one thing, but she’s being overly so when they both deserve to celebrate. “It _is_ a great start; we couldn’t have asked for a better one. Really, I’m thrilled.”

And Donna _is_ thrilled, of course, but that night, when she and Cameron are watching _I Dream of Jeanie_ , she admits to herself that her feelings about the launch are both mixed and complex. It’s late, later than either of them usually stays up these days, and Cameron has fallen asleep with her head on Donna’s shoulder. Without thinking about it, Donna runs her fingers through Cameron’s hair, touching her cheek. Asleep, Cameron looks younger than she is, as young as she had when they started working together at Mutiny eleven years ago. At the time, Donna had never really stopped to think that Cameron, who always seemed to be such a brilliant force of nature, was just a kid not all that much older than Joanie, a kid who was really an artist and not an entrepreneur, a kid with the enormous responsibility of running what became a multi-million dollar company. Donna, feeling one of the familiar pangs of regret that accost her whenever she thinks about Mutiny, wishes that she had realized then how hard everything must have been for Cameron, wishes that she had cut her just a little more slack to make things easier.

Cameron stirs slightly, nestling just a little bit closer, and an almost intolerable sense of melancholy washes over Donna. Right now, she feels so much older than Cameron; the nine years that separate them, which often seem like nothing at all, suddenly appear insurmountable. Cameron hasn’t raised daughters, or buried the father of her children; she isn’t old enough yet to feel the urgency of time passing the way Donna has begun to feel it.With that realization, she knows why she hasn’t been able to celebrate MusicLand’s preliminary success as joyfully as Cameron has. 

And that reason is this: MusicLand’s launch is not really the beginning, but the beginning of the end. (Or it may be the end of the beginning, like that quotation that always shows up in high school valedictorian speeches says, but ultimately it’s all the same thing.) This summer—really, the past eight months, the past _year_ —has been almost pure, unadulterated happiness. Donna has rarely experienced anything close to it, and she knows exactly how precious it is. But Phoenix has an inevitable end date, one that she and Cameron both acknowledged even when the company was just a flicker of their mutual imaginations. Someday—certainly not soon, but someday—there will be no Phoenix; it can be wonderful like this for awhile, but not forever. And when Phoenix ends, she and Cameron will walk away friends. Looking at Cameron now, sleeping peacefully beside her, Donna finds that she can’t bear the thought of that walking away. _At least someday isn’t now_ , she thinks, closing her eyes and leaning against Cameron. But she doesn’t find that thought as comforting as she wishes she did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Psst . . . you guys? Donna is totally in love with Cameron! :-)
> 
> A couple of notes. First, MusicLand. I don't remember anything like it in the mid-nineties, but the technology for it was certainly in place, and it *does* sound cool, doesn't it?
> 
> Second, Nick at Nite. Because I'm just *that* compulsive, I actually did research to make sure that I'd know exactly what shows Donna and Cam would have been watching in the summer of 1995. In case you're curious, here's a [summer of 1995 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLn6u4466g)promo of Nick at Nite.
> 
> The next two chapters will be Cameron POV. I don't want to be slavish about the alternating thing, and we need to do some serious checking in with Cam to see where her mind is, since it's pretty clear where Donna's is right now!


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron has the flu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So why not throw a little hurt/comfort into this stone soup of a fic?

When Cameron wakes up early one morning in September, she knows that something is wrong. Her throat is on fire, she’s queasy, and as soon as she tries to sit up, the room seems to tilt sideways. Shakily, she lies back down again.

 _Shit,_ she thinks. _I almost never get sick. What the hell?_

She has been vaguely aware that some sort of flu has been going around Symphonic—Trip has been out of the office for the past week, and, now that she thinks about it, Donna mentioned something about Diane, too. But she only goes there for a couple of hours a day! This shouldn’t be happening to her!

Through her haze, Cam is aware of a powerful need to get out of this house, to get back to her bed in the Airstream and wait there alone until this thing has passed. She wonders if that would be possible, if Donna will notice that she’s sick, or if she’d think it were weird if Cameron made some casual excuse and didn’t come back for a few days . . .

It turns out, of course, that Donna _does_ notice, and she notices at a glance, as soon as she sees Cameron in the kitchen trying to behave as though everything were totally normal.

“You’ve got that terrible flu, don’t you?” Donna touches Cameron’s forehead as though Cam were five years old, and all Cam can do in response is think how nice and cool Donna’s hand feels there.

“How did you know that?” Cam, after all, has just been sitting at the kitchen table, trying to drink a glass of orange juice. She hasn’t even said anything to Donna yet.

Donna just looks at her. “Cam, you’re white as a sheet, and your eyes are actually glassy. You obviously have a fever.”

Cam shrugs, thinking dully how interesting it is that being a mother has turned Donna into some sort of quasi-medical professional. Is there anything that Donna _isn’t_ good at? Her thoughts are coming slowly, but they’re still telling her that she really has to get out of Donna’s house, and fast: the primal desire to crawl into a hole to die seems to be the only thing in her that’s strong in her right now.

She attempts to communicate some version of that to Donna. “I think maybe I should just work in the Airstream today. We have so much to do if we’re going to get that new grunge page done by next month. And also, I don’t want to get you guys sick.”

Donna gives her another look. “You’re not doing any work today—anything you code is just going to have to be done over, and you know it. And it’s crazy for you to go all the way back to the Airstream, especially when you’re not in any shape to drive. Just get back into bed. If Haley and I are going to catch what you have, it’s already too late.”

Cameron tries again. “Look, I’m just—awful when I’m sick. I don’t want to be awful to you. It really would be better if I just wait for this stupid thing to go away and come back when it does.”

Donna touches Cam’s shoulder. “Look, I get it. That’s exactly the way Joanie is when she’s sick. I promise not to hover. You won’t even notice me.”

Cam is exhausted just by having this conversation. “It’s not that, not really anyway. I just . . . everything has been so good. I don’t want to wreck it.”

Donna gives her one of those affectionate looks that Cam sometimes thinks about alone in her bed at night. “You get a free pass on anything and everything you might say or do. What happens with the flu stays with the flu.”

And Cameron gives up, because there’s really nothing else that she can possibly do.

 

**§§§**

Donna is as good as her word: she doesn’t hover. Cameron, in fact, is barely aware of Donna at all in the next couple of days, save for the fact that a glass of ice water is always on her night table, and once when she falls asleep cold and shivering, she wakes with a down comforter around her that wasn’t there before. Mostly she sleeps, fitfully but long, dreaming odd dreams that she barely recalls when she pushes herself back into consciousness.

_She’s nine, and the terrible, burning itchiness all over seems as though it will never go away, even when she wriggles on the bed to try to scratch. When she finally can’t stand it anymore and calls out, her mother just answers back in a muzzy voice that she’ll be there in a minute, but the minute never comes._

Cam opens her eyes and catches Donna looking down at her. Cam can’t help smiling weakly at the sight. “Hey. What time is it?”

Donna glances at her big Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso watch. “It’s 1:30.” When Cam looks puzzled, Donna clarifies. “In the afternoon. On Friday.”

Cam can’t believe that she seems to have misplaced two days of her life, just like that. Then she focuses on another odd fact about what Donna has just said. “What are you doing here? It’s a work day.”

Donna shrugs. “Well, 12:00 to 2:00 is Phoenix time, and I figure that includes checking up on one-half of Phoenix.”

Cameron lets the thought of that drift through her mind like some sort of hot air balloon. Donna driving all the way back home from the office doesn’t really compute. Before she can form words to express that, however, Donna has moved on to a new topic. “Are you hungry? You’ve had practically nothing to eat since Wednesday night.” She touches Cam’s forehead. “I think you still have a little bit of fever.”

Cam closes her eyes for a moment, and then opens them again. She realizes that she does feel kind of hungry. “I think I am, actually. But I don’t know what I want to eat.”

“You want to eat soup,” Donna smiles as she says it. “I’ll fix something for you. But don’t worry—I’m not hovering. I’ll just deliver the soup and get the hell out of here.”

Cam nods and thinks drowsily to herself that this level of hovering is actually fine by her.

 

**§§§**

_Wondering where her mother is, she wakes one morning with her throat burning with pain, so much so that she can barely take a breath without feeling as though knives are stabbing through it. The itchiness is still there, and it seems as though red ants are crawling over every part of her body. She closes her eyes to will herself into sleep, to try to escape it, but sleep doesn’t come._

The next time Cameron opens her eyes, she’s stopped shivering but feels even more exhausted than she did before.She looks out the window and sees that it’s dark out, which means that she’s been asleep for at least five hours. Magically, Donna seems to appear on cue.

“How are you doing?” Donna’s lips are twitching, as if what she’s just said is the world’s funniest joke. And truthfully, Cam thinks it’s not a bad one.

“Hanging in there.” They both laugh.

“But seriously, how are you feeling? You look a little more like yourself, or at least, some really faint shadow of yourself.” Donna looks as though she’d like to say something more, but she stops herself.

Cameron shrugs a little. “I’m better, I’m pretty sure. I’m just really, really tired.”

“I’ll bet. How do you feel about scrambled eggs and toast? That can be the breakfast-for-dinner that you like so much.” Donna touches Cameron’s forehead, but this time it seems like more of a caress than the usual nurse-like checking-for-fever maneuver. Before Cam can think about that, Donna’s hand has moved quickly back to her side.

“I feel pretty good about scrambled eggs and toast.” Cameron looks at Donna a little crossly for a second. “Why aren’t you sick, too?”

Donna arches an eyebrow. “I never get sick.” At Cameron’s grumpy look, Donna grins. “So there it finally is.You’ve been a lot more agreeable as a patient than you said you’d be. You’re nowhere in the same league as Joanie!”

Cam rolls her eyes a little. “Yeah, well, beware. It can come at any time.” Privately she thinks to herself that this whole being-sick-at-Donna’s-house thing is a lot better than she would have thought.

Donna smiles at her again. “I’ll be careful. And I’ll go make those eggs now. I might even put cheese in them, but it’s going to be a lot better cheese than that orange powdered stuff you put into Cheese Egg. What is it with you and orange food, anyway?” She glides away, leaving Cameron to close her eyes and think about how actually great it is to be served breakfast-for-dinner in bed, that it doesn’t feel like hovering in the slightest.

 

**§§§**

_The headache doesn’t start for another day or so, but when it does, it throbs so intensely that it wakes her up in the night and makes her feel like crying. She knows she can’t cry, of course, that her mother would be furious if she made her get out of her own bed to see what the matter was. She bites her lip so hard that it bleeds, waiting for the pain to go away. After about a day, it finally does._

Cameron wakes up the next morning, still feeling tired but no longer as though she’s just been run over by a truck. According to her mental calculations, which admittedly are potentially less accurate than they usually are, it’s Saturday.

She’s sitting up trying to read the latest _Mercury News_ that has mysteriously appeared on the magic nightstand when Donna pokes her head into the bedroom. Seeing Cameron awake and reading, she smiles at her with broad relief. “You’re looking chipper!”

Cam nods. “Not perfect, but way better. It’s weird how tired I am, when all I’ve done for days is sleep. I don’t think I’ve slept as much in the past three months as I’ve slept in the past three days.”

“That’s the way these things always go. If it’s any comfort, you seem to be getting better faster than a lot of the Symphonic employees. I guess Cheese Egg and orange sodas are great boosts to the human immune system.” Donna’s voice is amused.

“Damn right,” Cam grins back.

“In a great burst of culinary activity, I have actually made— _made_ , not from a package—rice pudding. It’s not breakfast food, but you should be so turned around and inside out by now that we don’t need to be sticklers. Want some now?” Donna looks as though she’s trying hard to be nonchalant, probably so Cam won’t think that she’s fussing over her too much.

Cam, however, doesn’t feel a thing except grateful. “That sounds amazing. You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.”

Donna waves that off. “It’s no Chicken Marbella.” She tries to say that as a joke, but for some reason it comes out a little choked.

Cam always feels a little awkward about just how emotional Donna can get about that dinner, so she tries to change the subject quickly. “Anyway, rice pudding would be great. I think today is the day that I’ll officially be starving!”

“Good,” Donna smiles at her, looking happy. “I’ll be right back with it.”

 

**§§§**

_After four or five days with no appetite at all, she finally wakes up so hungry that her insides feel as though they’re squeezing themselves into tiny knotted balls and so lightheaded that she can barely sit up without the room starting to spin. She manages to get up to go see if her mother wants to have something to eat, too. She finds her in the bedroom, sound asleep even though it’s late in the afternoon, the unmistakable smell of bourbon emanating from the half-filled glass next to the bed. When she shakes her mother’s shoulder, the response is a low moan and something that sounds like “Just give me another ten minutes.” After that, she decides to look for something to eat herself, but the refrigerator has nothing in it except a few cartons of yogurt and some stale slices of pizza. As she reaches for a yogurt, another wave of dizziness hits her, this one so intense that she feels herself crashing to the floor. When she comes out of it, she sits up shakily, retches several times with nothing in her stomach to vomit, and crawls back to bed clutching the carton of yogurt to save for later._

Cameron wakes up trembling, this time remembering her dream clearly and wishing that she couldn’t. As she opens her eyes, she sees Donna next to her.

“Cam? What’s the matter?” Donna’s face is openly worried, and this time she’s not making any effort to act casual and unconcerned.

Cam is about to ask what she means, but then to her horror she realizes that she has been crying in her sleep, and that the tears are still running down her face.Dammit! She wipes them away impatiently and tries to pretend that none of it is happening. “Nothing. It’s just . . . sometimes this is how it is when I’m sick.”

Donna sits down on the bed next to her. “What do you mean, sometimes this is how it is when you’re sick? I heard you . . . what’s going on?”

Cameron can’t believe that she made enough noise in her sleep to send Donna running to check on her. Jesus! She sighs. “It’s no big deal. It’s going to sound worse than it really was.”

Donna looks at her steadily. “Ok, I'll keep that in mind. Tell me.”

Cam closes her eyes, not really wanting to see Donna when she talks about this. “When I was nine, a couple of months after my father died, I got the chicken pox. We found out later that it was worse for me than it is for most other people because I was allergic, or something—those pox things actually got into my throat. Anyway, my mother was sort of a mess then, so I just kind of had to deal. But it didn’t last too long, and it ended up ok. I got better, obviously. It’s just that . . . sometimes being sick makes me remember it.”

Suddenly exhausted, Cameron keeps her eyes closed, and for a few moments there isn’t any response from Donna at all. But then Cam is being pulled into a hug that seems to be everywhere, and Donna’s lips are brushing her forehead. Cameron hears herself letting out a ragged, audible sob that would have mortified her if she had spare strength for mortification, and Donna’s embrace tightens around her. They stay like that until Cam drifts back to sleep, this time dreamlessly. As she does, she feels herself surrendering entirely, somehow simultaneously both nine years old and thirty-three, letting herself be loved and safer than she has ever known herself to be. When she wakes up again, Donna is gone, but the feeling of her remains with Cameron for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, I know that this one is a little melodramatic, but you're just going to have to get used to the idea that fucked-up Cameron getting healed by Donna is my Kryptonite--I'm helpless before it, and it's more or less what this endlessly long fic is really about. Sorry! According to my research, you really CAN get chicken pox in your throat. That sounds horrendous, doesn’t it? Poor Cam!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein several conversations occur and something unexpected is revealed.

It’s early October, and Cameron, Donna, and Haley have just finished dinner, courtesy of their favorite Chinese takeout place. Cameron is pondering whether she wants just another spoonful or two of the Kung Pao chicken when she hears Haley saying something.

“Can I talk to you both?” Haley isn’t looking at either Donna or Cameron, which is a little peculiar.Then again, Cameron recalls, Haley had been unusually quiet all during dinner.

Cameron and Donna share a quick glance, and then Donna answers. “Of course. What’s up?”

Haley, who had been standing, sits down again at the table. “I kind of wanted to tell you both something.” She stops, unconsciously shredding her napkin into neat tiny pieces and then pushing them together into a little pile on the table.

Donna waits a couple of beats and then prods her gently. “We’re here, bug.” All at once, Cameron has a feeling that she knows what Haley is about to say, and out of the corner of her eye she sees that Donna does as well. This time, they don’t look at each other directly, both of them waiting for Haley.

When Haley does say something, she keeps her eyes on the shredded napkin pile in front of her. “So, you know Jordan?”

They do know Jordan, of course. She’s been over for several Sunday brunches, and she’s often there on weekday evenings as well, studying with Haley. Even if they’d somehow managed to miss all that, Haley talks about Jordan all the time.

“Sure,” Donna answers. “Your chem lab partner.” She keeps her tone carefully neutral.

“Yeah.” Haley pauses for a few seconds, and then starts again. “Right. So, we’re friends. But it turns out that . . . Jordan’s gay. And, like, so am I.” Haley says this last part all in a rush, a dark flush creeping over her cheeks.

Cameron watches Donna, wondering what she’s going to do right now. Without hesitating, Donna gets up from the table, walks over to Haley’s chair, and puts her arms around her daughter. Haley exhales slowly, leaning against her.

Donna is the first of the two of them to break the silence. “I love you, absolutely and always. You know that, right?” Haley nods, hugging her mother back.

Just as Cameron is starting to feel a little awkward about being there, Haley twists around to look at her. Cam realizes then that she ought to say something, too. Before she can consider what might be best, or at least appropriate, words are already coming out of her mouth. “I like Jordan a lot. You guys seem really great together.” When Haley grins at her, Cameron realizes with relief that it might have been an ok thing to say.

“Yeah, I like her too. We’re . . . going to a school dance together in a couple of weeks. There haven’t been many gay couples, but she wants to try, and I want to do it if she wants to.” Haley is blushing as she says this, but she also looks extremely happy.

Donna runs her fingers through Haley’s short hair. “I’m glad you can do that, and that the two of you _want_ to do that. I hope you have a fantastic time.”

“Neither of us are really into school things, but Jordan thinks we should show up and kind of make sure that people know that gay couples are ok, and it’s possible that it might even be . . . fun.” Haley gives Cameron a dubious glance, and Cam smirks back at her.A healthy scorn for high school life is one of the things that bonds them together.

Donna laughs and hugs Haley again, and Cam sees that she has tears in her eyes. “I’m so proud of you.”

“For what? For going to a dance?” Cameron knows that Haley is perfectly aware of what Donna means and that she’s trying to take a little air out of the drama in the atmosphere.

“Yes, that’s it exactly. I’m proud of you for going to a dance,” Donna says, brushing a little hair from Haley’s forehead. She’s smiling, and then Haley is smiling too.

“There’s one more thing,” says Haley, looking up at her mother. “I . . . well, I told Joanie awhile ago, so she knows. And . . . I also told Joe, like, in a letter that I wrote to him.”

Cameron sees a complicated _something_ flash across Donna’s face, a little frisson that might have been jealousy, or sadness, or anxiety, or some combination of all of those. But it’s gone so quickly that she can’t be sure, and then Donna is smiling at Haley again.

“That’s fine. I’m glad you could tell that to Joe, and of course you’d tell your sister.” Donna puts her arms around Haley again, holding her, and Haley visibly relaxes for the first time since the conversation began.

“With Joe it was just . . . I kind of wanted to try to tell someone in a letter, before I told anyone in real life. I mean, I told Joanie first right before she left for New York, but that was sort of easy, and she pretty much already knew, anyway. But I thought Joe could be like, practice, before I told you and Cameron, and I know that he’s . . . I mean, I remember hearing Dad and you talk about how he was bisexual, so . . .” Haley stops, looking worried.

“Honey, it’s fine. Joe really cares about you.” Donna’s voice is so reassuring that even Cameron believes that she means exactly what she’s saying, and probably she mostly does.

“Ok,” says Haley, finally pulling away. “Thanks. I guess I should get some homework done.” Grabbing an apple from the fruit basket on the counter, Haley leaves the kitchen and walks toward her bedroom.

 

**§§§**

Later that evening, Cameron and Donna are sitting out by the pool on chaise lounges. The night air is a little chilly, and they’re both huddled under the same large Hudson Bay blanket.

Donna sighs. “I’m so glad that Haley finally said something.” She takes a sip of the glass of wine on the table next to her chair.

Cameron nods. “Yeah.” Privately, she wonders if Haley would have been more comfortable telling Donna alone, if maybe she had just given up on that idea because Cameron never leaves these days. The thought makes her feel a little guilty.

Donna turns to look at Cam with soft eyes, almost as though she knows exactly what thought is flitting through Cam’s mind right now and wants to reassure her. But that, Cam thinks, is obviously completely impossible. “This was one of those times . . . there aren’t many like them, when you know that whatever you do, your kid is going to remember it forever, for better or for worse. It’s a little terrifying.” Donna closes her eyes for a moment.

“Well, you were perfect,” Cam says, meaning it. She can’t imagine Donna having any regrets about how she handled things with Haley tonight.

“Thanks,” Donna says, smiling at her. “I thought I was prepared for everything; God knows, I went over this conversation in my head a million times over the past year. But when Haley told me that she’d told Joe before she told us, well . . . that was an unexpected curve ball.”

Cameron tucks that _us_ away in the back of her mind, to pull out and mull over later. “Yeah. I was . . . well, surprised, but then _not_ , you know? It kind of made sense, what Haley said. I mean, I can see why she’d want to do that.”

Donna sighs again. “I can, too. I don’t know why it stung a little; I’m glad that she still has a relationship with Joe. They write pretty often, and I’ve noticed that they’re talking on the phone more, too.”

Cam had noticed that as well. “Yeah. Well, Haley is really important to Joe. I’m glad he hasn’t disappeared from her life.” She’s leaving a lot unsaid in that sentence, and she knows that Donna is aware that Cameron hasn’t had any contact with Joe since they broke up a year ago.

Donna hesitates. “Has Haley . . . told you anything about him?”

Cam shakes her head. “Not really, but I haven’t asked. All I know from her is that he went back to school last year to finish up a master’s that I didn’t even know he’d ever started, in literature of all things. And now he’s teaching at some posh boarding school.” The whole thing sounds so bizarre to Cameron that she sometimes wonders if she’d ever really known Joe at all.

“Yeah, she told me that, too. It’s hard to imagine it, but then again, maybe it isn’t. He really enjoyed being with Haley and Joanie, and he’s great with them.” Donna is looking at Cameron with a little too much focus, as if to gauge her reaction to all of this.

Cameron shrugs a little. “Yeah, he really was. I guess . . . I hope he’s happy, teaching. I mean, he deserves to be, especially after I messed up his life.” She stops as a bit of melancholy washes over her.

Donna just looks at her. “Cam, you didn’t mess up his life. Or if you did, that’s just what happens sometimes. Sometimes things just . . . don’t work out, but the caring and the love don’t disappear.” Cameron knows that Donna is thinking about Gordon as she says it. They sit together silently for a moment, both mulling over the past.

 

**§§§**

While Donna cleans up the kitchen, Cameron decides to go upstairs to talk to Haley. Her bedroom door is open, but Cam knocks on it anyway.

Haley is lying on her bed, reading _An American Tragedy_ for her English class. She looks up when she hears Cameron’s knock and smiles at her. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” says Cam. She nods her chin at the book. “So what’s the tragedy?”

“This poor kid gets to be friends with rich people, but then he ends up getting a poor girl pregnant and kind of accidentally-on-purpose drowns her. He sort of sucks.” Haley grimaces at Cam, who laughs.

“Sound like the usual jerk,” Cameron hesitates. “You were pretty great tonight, squirt. I was . . . “ Cameron wants to say that she was really proud of Haley, because she was, but she thinks it might sound dorky.

Haley gives her an oddly mature look, as if she’s the older of the two of them, as if she realizes just how hard some things are for Cameron to utter out loud. “Thanks. I just . . . I really wanted to tell you guys. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

Cameron nods. “Telling stuff like that to people . . . it’s really important. I’m glad you have the kind of relationship with your mom that you can do it.”

Haley looks at her. “With you, too.”

Cameron feels a flash of warmth, a little prickly burn around her eyes. She swallows and nods.

“Do you think my mom minded when I told her about telling Joe?I mean, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t mind about Joanie, but Joe is different. I almost didn’t mention it, but that felt like lying somehow, and I didn’t want to lie about anything with this.” Haley isn’t meeting Cam’s eyes as she says this.

Cameron sees how much this is worrying Haley. “She was totally ok about it,” Cam says, badly wanting to reassure her. “Maybe she was a little surprised, but that’s all. She’s glad you’re friends with Joe. I’m . . . I’m glad, too.”

Haley clearly picks up on Cam’s little hesitation over the last sentence, but she doesn’t comment on it. “He was pretty great about the whole thing. He told me . . . he said that my dad kind of knew about it, and that he was fine with it.” Haley’s voice is suddenly thick, and Cameron sits down on the bed next to her, putting a tentative arm around her shoulders.They stay like that for a moment, and then Haley clears her throat. “It was good to hear that, you know? Otherwise, I’d always have wondered if it might have made him hate me, or something.”

Cameron tightens her arm around Haley just a little bit. “There’s nothing you could ever do that would have made him hate you. I know that for an absolute fact.”

Haley nods, and Cameron thinks for a second about her own father, wondering if _she_ could have ever done anything that would have made him hate her. She’s startled away from that line of thought when she hears Haley saying something else about Joe.

“He asks about you sometimes,” Haley is obviously a little uncomfortable. “I’ve told him about how great Phoenix is doing, and how you’re sort of living with us now.”

“What does he say about all that?” Cameron wishes that she didn’t ask that, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

“He’s glad. He says that it sounds as though you’re happy. You are, aren’t you? Happy, I mean.” Haley asks it tentatively, as if Cameron’s answer is really important to her.

Cam nods firmly. “Yeah. I am. Totally.” She nudges Haley a little, who grins at her.

“I’m glad,” Haley says, looking it. “Cam?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you, like, want to have Joe’s phone number? In case you ever want to call him?” Haley looks a little shy as she asks this.

Cam is startled. “Um . . . “

“I just think . . . we don’t have a lot of people, you know? You said you loved him. Maybe you should kind of . . . keep him around.” Haley seems to be looking everywhere except at Cameron.

Cameron sighs to herself. She hates her tendency to run from people when things are difficult, and in a way she’d like to have Joe in her life again. On the other hand, she knows that things are completely over between them for anything except maybe friendship, and they were never really friends. They were two people who were too messed up in the same sorts of ways to help each other past it, complicated by a whole lot of physical attraction. _Maybe_ , Cam thinks now, _you need two people messed up in_ different _ways to make a relationship really work._

“Cam?” Haley is waiting for her to say something.

Cam sighs again, this time audibly. “I guess you can give it to me.Thanks, Haley.”

 

**§§§**

Emotionally drained, Cameron and Donna tacitly agree to cut that night’s MusicLand work session short and just hang out drinking wine and watching some mindless television. But Cameron isn’t really able to concentrate on _Welcome Back, Kotter,_ and she doesn’t think that Donna is, either. She’s about to suggest that they just go to bed early when she hears Donna saying something.

“So . . . I slept with a woman in college. It was my sophomore year, and it only lasted a couple of months. I’m trying to decide if I should tell Haley about it. On the one hand, maybe it’ll help her be totally sure that I’m ok with everything, in case she has any doubts. But on the other hand, maybe it would be . . . weird, or as if I’m trying to steal her thunder, or something else. What do you think?” Donna is staring at the television as she asks this question, but clearly not really seeing it.

Cameron gapes at her, not sure that she could possibly have heard Donna correctly. “What? What do you . . . what do you mean?”

Now Donna does turn to her, looking equal parts awkward and amused. “Well, I think you know what I _mean_ , don’t you?”

Cameron can’t seem to find it in her right now to laugh. “Um . . . How did it . . .”

Donna appears to take pity on her. “It really wasn’t a big deal. It was Berkeley in the ‘70s, and there was a lot of, I guess you could call it, _experimentation_ going on. I was just curious, and my roommate’s best friend was nice and really attractive; it just sort of happened. We were friends, but I wasn’t in love with her. Once I met Gordon and got serious about him, we broke up pretty amicably.”

Cameron sucks in a lungful of air, grateful that she’s able to breathe again. “Did you ever sleep with another woman after that?”

Donna shakes her head. “Nope. I was faithful to Gordon the whole time we were married, and after that, well, the opportunity never presented itself.” She seems to be on verge of saying something more, but nothing else comes out after that.

Cameron still feels shaken by all this, and she doesn’t understand why, not exactly. She hadn’t been shocked in the least by Haley, and she had felt nothing but uncomplicated pleasure at the thought of Haley’s going to a dance with a girl that she really likes. But picturing Donna with another woman feels like anything but uncomplicated.

“So what do you think?” Donna is looking at her, apparently puzzled.

Cam stares at her. “Think about . . . ?”

“About whether it’s a good idea to talk to Haley about it. What do you think?” Donna’s expression is becoming uneasy, and Cameron can see that she’s wishing she hadn’t brought up this subject at all.

“I think . . . maybe not right now. Eventually, I think you should, but she needs to work through all this a little bit on her own first.” Cameron is pleased that she’s able to give advice that sounds measured and mature, even though her brain seems still to be having trouble chipping away at the formidable job of processing _I slept with a woman in college_.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Thanks, Cam.” Donna is looking right at her, and Cameron wonders what it is that she’s seeing. “You can ask me whatever it is that you want to ask me,” Donna says suddenly. “It’s fine.”

Cam takes a breath. “What was it like?”

“It was . . . different.” Donna looks thoughtful.

“Good different?” Cam’s heart is thumping a little hard, and for some reason her hands are shaking.

“ _Different_ different, but yes, good in some ways.” Donna hesitates, and then looks at Cam. “You never . . . ?”

“Nope.” Cam says it quickly, and thinks she sees a flash of something that might be disappointment on Donna’s face, but it’s hard to tell in a darkened room lit only by the flickering of a television set.

Donna exhales slowly, and then gives Cam a half-smile. “It was a really long time ago; it feels as though it might have happened to someone else entirely. I haven’t thought about it in years, but with Haley . . . well, I guess it stands to reason that I’d be thinking about it now.”

Cameron nods, not having anything to say to that, and she feels Donna tap her on the shoulder. “I think I’m going to go crash. Do you want to keep watching TV?”

Cam shrugs, then nods. She watches Donna leave the room and feels as though her mind will never settle itself down enough to allow her to sleep tonight.

 

**§§§**

It’s 3:30 AM, and Cameron is still sitting on the couch, not-watching Nick at Nite. She puts her hand into her the pocket of her jeans and fiddles around with the scrap of paper that she knows contains Joe’s telephone number, the one Haley had given to her earlier in the evening. She takes the paper out and stares at it: 914-555-9814. For some reason, and suddenly, the idea of talking to Joe is tempting, although she knows that it’s also ridiculous and probably unfair to him. But still . . .

Cameron glances at her watch. It would be 6:30 AM in Armonk, and Joe is an early riser. She’s picking up the phone and dialing before she’s even decided just how terrible an idea this really is.

“Hello?” It’s Joe’s voice, and for a moment, Cameron freezes.

“Hello?” Joe again, sounding a little impatient this time.

Cameron takes a deep breath and manages to push sound out of her vocal cords. “It’s . . . Cameron.” There’s silence on the other end, and Cam isn’t surprised by that. She tries again. “I’m . . . I’m sorry I haven’t called before.”

“Is anything wrong?” Joe sounds different, more reserved than she remembers, but she couldn’t reasonably expect a warm and fuzzy greeting after everything that’s happened between the two of them.

Cam shakes her head, then remembers that Joe can’t actually see her. “No, everything’s fine. I just . . . well, Haley came out tonight, and she told us that she’d already told you, and, I don’t know, I just wanted to call you.”

She hears Joe’s huff of a breath on the other end. “I’m glad she did that. I’ve been thinking about her. Did it . . . go well?”

“Yeah, it really did. Donna was . . . totally great. I think Haley’s going to be fine.” Talking about Haley is definitely easier than talking about each other.

“That’s good to hear.” Joes hesitates, then asks, “And how are you doing?”

“Good. Donna and I are working on Phoenix, and it’s going pretty well. We’re both excited about it.” Cam doesn’t know how much she should tell Joe about Phoenix, because it does kind of seem as though she chose working with Donna over working with him. It wasn’t quite that way, of course, but the subject still feels awkward.

“I’ve seen your MusicLand site, and I think it’s incredible. I’m really . . . proud of you, Cameron.” Joe’s voice is warm now, and Cameron suddenly feels as though she might cry.

“Thanks. So . . . how’s teaching?” She still can’t believe that Joe is actually teaching humanities at a high school.

“It’s just amazing. I kind of think it’s the job I’ve always been looking for and just never quite knew it. I love the kids, and I love talking to them about these incredible books. It’s just . . . it’s kind of the opposite of always looking into the future, you know? I get to think about the past, and there’s something really freeing about not having to look over the horizon to the next thing all the time.” Joe sounds genuinely excited, and Cameron feels a sense of relief as she listens to him talk. Maybe, just maybe, she didn’t ruin his life after all.

“Yeah, I can see that.” Cameron can’t imagine anything like that for herself, but she can sort of understand its appeal for Joe, and she also sees why he’d want to get out of tech. There was something about it that brought out the worst in him, at least some of the time.

 “Cam . . . why did you call? It’s almost four in the morning where you are. What’s going on?”

Joe has that warm, slow tone that she knows so well, the one that means he really does want to hear what she has to say. Cam hesitates, and then plunges in. “Um, well, Donna told me something kind of weird tonight. She said that she had an affair with a woman in college.” Cameron feels a little foolish as she tells Joe this.

Joe is silent for a moment. “How do you feel about that?”

Cam sighs. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I just feel sort of . . . strange about it.”

“What kind of strange? Do you think any less of her because of it?” Joe’s voice is a fraction less warm.

“No! Of course not! It’s nothing like that. It’s . . . I don’t know what it is.” Cameron is starting to feel like an asshole, and she wishes that she never called Joe in the first place. She tries again. “It just seems . . . surprising. I mean, I didn’t feel anything like that with Haley, but with Donna . . .”

“I can tell you one thing, well, two things, from personal experience. One, if Donna told you that, it’s because she trusts you. And two, if Donna told you that, she had a reason for doing it.” Joe’s voice is serious, and Cameron thinks about what he’s just said.

“She said she wanted my opinion about whether or not she should tell Haley about it.”

“Hmm,” says Joe. “Maybe that’s all there was to it. Or maybe it’s that and also something else.The point is, that’s something that only you can figure out. But if I were you, I’d think about it some more.”

Cam rolls her eyes. Mysterious, Zen Joe isn’t really the Joe that she wants right now. Then again, she’s not exactly sure _what_ she wants, or why she called.All she knows for sure is that for some reason she wanted to talk about this, and Joe seemed like the right person for the job. “Thanks. I’ll . . . I’ll do that. I’m sorry—I probably shouldn’t have called to talk about this.”

“You never really talked to me about Donna before, have you?” Joe sounds thoughtful. “Why do you think that was?”

Cam has wondered that herself. “I think it’s because . . . you were always on my side, and I knew that you didn’t like Donna because of what she did to me, with Mutiny. But I didn’t want that from you, not for this.”

“Why not?” Joe sounds as though he really wants to understand what she’s saying.

Cameron barely gets it herself, but she tries to explain anyway. “I think I always knew that it was partly my fault, what happened. It wouldn’t have felt right, hearing you trash Donna, but I didn’t want to have a real conversation about it, either. It seemed easier just to avoid the whole thing.”

“So you were protecting her, even when you weren’t speaking to her?” 

Cameron shrugs. “Yeah, I guess so, sort of. Not all the time, not with everyone. But for some reason, that’s how I felt with you.”

“I get that,” Joes says. “And now you don’t want to avoid talking about it anymore.”

“Yeah, now I don’t. But I don’t know . . . maybe telling you something that Donna probably doesn’t want me to talk about to anyone else wasn’t such a great move, either.” Belatedly, Cameron is wondering if she'd broken some confidence by initiating this conversation with Joe.

“You didn’t call me up in the middle of the night just to gossip about Donna; I know that this is important to you. And I’m glad you called. I want us to be in each other’s lives, if we can be. I don’t want us to disappear for years before we talk again.” Joe’s voice washes over Cameron, and she’s glad that she managed to make this call after all.

“I want that too,” says Cameron.

“Cam . . . by the way, I’m . . . seeing someone who might be . . . his name is Brian, and he’s a Latin teacher at my school.” Joe sounds suddenly awkward.

“Latin teacher? Wow, you have gone old school, haven’t you?” Cam finds that she feels nothing except happiness for Joe and relief for herself.It’s really over, completely and permanently. Maybe now they really _will_ be able to be friends.

“I guess I have. You’d like him, Cam.” Joe’s voice is relieved as well. “Hey, I kind of have to go—early class. But call me again if you need to talk about. . . anything at all. I’m here if you want me to be.”

Cam nods. “Thanks, Joe. Really. I appreciate it.” And she does, but when they hang up, Cam realizes that she’s still no closer to figuring out why she was so bugged about Donna’s reveal than she had been before she and Joe talked at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In [one of haltandcatchfiretothemax's Tumblr headcanons](http://haltandcatchfiretothemax.tumblr.com/post/170597290846/femslash-february-2018-428-in-which-cameron-and), she imagines that Donna had been in love with a woman in college, but she implies that it never was sexual. Before she wrote that, I'd had a similar but opposite idea: I wanted Donna to have had a physical affair with a woman, but I didn't want it to have been a big emotional deal. It seems reasonable, because Berkeley in the 70's *was* filled with a lot of that sort of thing. I felt like Cameron needed some jolt to get her to think that a relationship with Donna was actually possible, and this seemed like a good way to get that done. The mechanics of this thing are difficult and vexing!


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein the past informs the present.

After a productive working Saturday in mid-October, Donna and Cameron are sitting by the campfire on Cameron’s land. Tonight’s menu is beer and s’mores, a peculiar combination which both of them unexpectedly love, but the post-work conversation isn’t flowing the way it usually does. Donna looks at Cam, thinking about how quiet in general she’s been over the last week, how unusually hard (even for Cameron) she’s been working, wondering if she should ask her about it. She’s just about to say something when Cameron breaks the silence herself.

“I called Joe last week.” Cameron says,looking at the flickering fire rather than at Donna.

Donna is startled, and more than a little unnerved. “Oh? How did it go?” Although she wants to, she doesn’t ask _why did you do that?_ and _what does it mean?_

Cameron shrugs. “Fine, I guess. I mean, at least it wasn’t horrible. It was a little weird, since we haven’t talked in about a year.” She hesitates, and then doesn’t say anything else.

Frustrated and oddly anxious, Donna wants more, but she knows that sometimes it’s better to be patient with Cam and let her open up at her own pace, in her own way. She just nods and waits.

Cameron looks at Donna, and then starts speaking again. “He seems happy, and I’m really glad about that. He likes teaching, and he told me that he’s with someone, a guy named Brian.” Cameron voice isn’t betraying any emotion, but Donna wonders how she’s really feeling.

“That’s good.” It’s not much, but it’s all Donna can come up with right now.

Cameron sighs. “Yeah, it’s good. He was so . . . destroyed when Gordon died, I almost didn’t think he’d ever be able to be happy again. In some ways, he and Gordon were closer than he and I ever were, or ever could be. They just sort of _got_ each other, you know?”

Donna knows, of course she knows. “Gordon loved working with Joe, I know that. It’s funny, when you think about where they started, and where they ended up.” She doesn’t elaborate, but she’s sure that Cameron knows that she’s talking about them, too.

Nodding, Cameron says, “Yeah. It’s weird how things go.”

 _It sure is,_ Donna thinks to herself. _Life moves in completely unpredictable arcs._

“Donna . . .” Cam’s voice is a little hesitant. “I’ve never exactly asked you about Gordon, about how you knew that it was over.”

Donna looks at her. “That’s right, you haven’t. Are you asking now?”

Cameron nods, and Donna wonders why she _is_ asking now, after a year and a half of conversations about practically everything else.

Now it’s Donna’s turn to shrug. “The cracks were there from the beginning, even though I tried not to see them. Gordon was always really insecure about a lot of things, and I wasn’t great at making him feel better.” She stops, thinking about her many regrets about her marriage. It wasn’t all her fault, she knows that, but she could have done better, and she wishes that she had.

Cameron is looking at her, and Donna has an uneasy sense that Cam is reading her mind. “I know that Gordon wasn’t the easiest person, especially when I first met him. He was pretty intense.”

“Yeah, he was that, for sure,” Donna says, thinking to herself that in many ways Cameron is a lot like Gordon, and in just as many ways she’s completely different from him.

“How did it end exactly, with the two of you? I mean, how did you know it was definitely over? With Joe, it was just . . . we both sort of knew it at the exact same time. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and we . . . we could tell it was done. Was it like that with you?” Cameron doesn’t usually ask Donna questions like this, and Donna finds herself wanting to be as honest as it’s possible for her to be, even though the honest answer is . . . complicated

She takes a breath, and then plunges in. “It actually had a lot to do with Mutiny, I think. Everything got a lot worse for us after . . . after everything that happened.”

_Gordon doesn’t speak to her at all on the drive back from Cameron’s party, and she doesn’t feel like talking, either. It isn’t until they have both silently undressed and climbed into bed that he says anything at all._

_“You didn’t have to do that.” He’s lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “Mutiny was Cameron’s company. It was everything to her.”_

_She turns her head away from him so she can look at the wall instead. “Don’t you think I know that? I didn’t plan any of this. It just . . . happened.”_

_Suddenly he’s turning to her, glaring furiously. “That’s bullshit, Donna. It didn’t just ‘happen.’ You made it happen. You could have tried to compromise, or tried to talk to Cam alone, or lots of other things. But you chose this instead.”_

Cameron nods, and Donna knows that she’s hinted at this to Cam before, so it shouldn’t really be much of a surprise. She’d never, however, told her just how bad it was between herself and Gordon during the days immediately following voting Cameron out of Mutiny.

“That night, at the party, Gordon was the one who told me that you were . . . what you were thinking about doing.” Cam’s voice is hoarse, and Donna feels tears coming into her own eyes, tears that she tries to will away through sheer mental effort. Neither of them usually wants to talk about that time; it’s the one subject that they carefully sidestep, because it’s just too painful for both of them. Donna wishes that they weren’t talking about it now.

“I know he did. I always wondered if maybe . . . if maybe things would have gone differently if he hadn’t done that. But I know that Gordon did it because he cared about you, and I respected him for that even when everything was falling apart.” Donna _had_ respected Gordon for doing what he did, even though it had made everything infinitely harder for her. Until then, she actually hadn’t realized just how close Gordon and Cameron had become since they moved to California.

Cameron doesn’t say anything, but she takes Donna’s hand and squeezes it a little, as if to reassure her (maybe reassure both of them) that this subject is part of the past, not the present or the future, as if to siphon off a little of the pain it’s costing Donna to discuss this at all. It’s really an amazing gesture, considering all the pain about Mutiny that Cam has on her own. Donna squeezes back, more grateful for the touch than she could possibly ever express.

After a moment, Donna speaks again. “The fight we had after that night . . . we’d had bad fights before, but this one was one of the worst that I can remember. It was just . . . awful.”

_“I didn’t choose anything,” Donna spits back at Gordon. “You forced this to happen, and you fucking well know that you did. Why did you have to say anything about this to Cameron? Especially at her party?”_

_“Party, yeah, right. I don’t know who you are anymore, Donna.” Gordon’s expression shifts from furious to a sort of loneliness that Donna just can’t manage to absorb right now, so she holds on to her own rage and blocks it out._

_“Cameron’s compulsive perfectionism would have killed Mutiny entirely, and if you would just let yourself think rationally, you’d be able to see that I’m right. If we waited a year before the IPO, our value might have plummeted. Cameron just can’t manage to think like a practical businessperson. It’s all about Mutiny’s_ soul _and its_ roots _and everything else instead.” Donna is tired of this argument, and she’s trying hard to ignore the pangs of guilt that are starting to ooze through her no matter how hard she attempts to ignore them. She’s also trying not to see Cameron’s face when she realized that she’d lost her company, not to hear the sound she made—exactly like a dying animal—before she staggered out of the meeting room._

_“So you talk with her, you figure out a way to make it work. The minute Cameron said she would leave if the vote didn’t go her way, you should have pulled back. That should have been the end of it. You should have said that there was no company without Cam. Instead, you decided to vote out the person who founded Mutiny and gave you a job in the first place.” Gordon has rolled over again onto his back to gaze again at the ceiling, as if he can’t stand looking at Donna right now._

Cameron looks at Donna and sighs. “I didn’t know any of that at the time, and I’m not sure I would have wanted to know it. Gordon and I didn’t talk for months after it all happened. Actually, we never really talked at all—he wrote me an email after I’d be in Japan for about six months, and I answered it. After that, we wrote back and forth a little bit every once in awhile.”

Donna nods. “I knew that he was writing to you, but he never talked about you at all to me. We stayed together for about two years after the fight we had that night, but I think we both knew that we were just treading water and waiting for one of us to have the guts to end things.”

Cameron hesitates, and then asks, “So which of you . . . had the guts?”

“Me,” Donna says simply. “I just got to the point where I wanted it to be over officially, since I knew it had really been over for quite awhile. Everything was terrible then—Mutiny was on its way out, and I didn’t have any way to save it. I just didn’t have . . . anything, really. I think it might have been the worst time of my life.” She stops, unable to say more, trying not to think about those months any more than she has to.

Cameron is biting her lip, and Donna has learned over the past year that she does that when she’s fighting with some deep, private emotion. Donna guesses that Cameron has always done that, but for some reason she never really noticed it when they were working together at Mutiny. _There’s so much that I never noticed then_ , she thinks to herself (and not for the first time).

What Cameron finally says, however, is a surprise. “It was worse for you than it was for me, with Mutiny. I never really saw that before, because I was just so focused on my own stuff about it. But it was really worse for you.” Cam is looking at Donna with such a complex expression, one with so much depth of feeling in it, that Donna can’t meet her eyes for long; it’s too much like staring straight into the sun for that.

“What do you mean?” Donna really can’t imagine what Cam _could_ mean, especially since she knows exactly how hard losing Mutiny was for her.

Cam fiddles with a stick that she happens to be holding, then tosses it into the fire. “It’s just . . . I had this thing done _to_ me, you know? So I could just feel bad, and angry, and that was it. It was crappy, but it wasn’t complicated. But you _did_ the thing, and it didn’t work out the way you thought it would. So you couldn’t just feel bad about it, the way I could. You had to feel guilty, too, and that’s worse.” Cam shrugs apologetically, helplessly, as if in doubt that she’s making any sense at all.

Donna just stares at her. “Cameron . . . “ She trails off, unable to say what she’s thinking. _You’re an amazingly generous person, a better person than I am._ She feels the familiar prickle of tears in her eyes that happens every single time she thinks about the end of Mutiny, and she hopes that Cameron doesn’t notice.

Cameron, obviously noticing but choosing not to say anything, smiles at Donna. “Hey, it’s not as though I _always_ felt that way. I was mad literally for years; I probably didn’t stop being mad until I finished making Pilgrim. That game just . . . it sort of put everything into perspective for some reason.”

Donna can understand that easily, since playing Pilgrim did the same thing for her. “I thought we were never going to be able to talk about any of this.” She’s surprised to hear herself saying that, but it’s coming out of her mouth nonetheless.

Cam smiles at her again. “Well, we’ve talked about pretty much everything else there is over the past year. We were bound to get to it sooner or later, whether we wanted to or not.”

Donna nods, feeling one of those waves of emotion that seem to be hitting her more and more frequently these days when it comes to Cameron. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.” She doesn’t add anything else, and for some reason just saying these words feels insurmountably difficult for something so completely inadequate. Donna has never been more sorry for anything in her life as she is for what happened with Mutiny, up to and including her divorce.

It’s really dark now, and the only light anywhere is the flickering of the campfire in front of them. Donna feels Cameron’s hand squeezing hers again. “I know you are. I am, too. We really put each other through hell, didn’t we?”

“We really did.” They sit together silently after that, just watching the fire, communally relieved that the past is truly past.

_“I’m leaving Mutiny.” It’s the next day and both of them are in the kitchen trying to eat breakfast, but the fight still hasn’t ended._

_“Now? When I’m in the middle of filing for the IPO? Can’t you wait a couple of weeks, at least?” Donna is trying to sound reasonable, but it comes out harsh instead._

_“No, I can’t. The Macmillan lawsuit is finished. Instead of payment, I’ve taken possession of a mainframe and some networking hardware. I’ll be starting a regional hub on NSFNET. And that’s going to be happening . . . with Joe. We’re working together.” Gordon gives Donna a hard look, daring her to say what she’s obviously thinking._

_She can’t help herself. “Gordon, what the hell is that? Working with_ Joe _? Have you lost your mind?”_

_Gordon jerks his head a little, and Donna guiltily realizes that she probably shouldn’t be throwing around that particular line to someone with a degenerative brain disorder. “I’m not sticking around watching you run Mutiny without Cameron.”_

_Donna’s patience with this subject is just about at an end. “Would you stop talking about Cameron? First of all, I’m you’re wife, not her. And second, you voted for it too. If you were so goddamn against it, you shouldn’t have raised your hand.”_

_Gordon regards her bitterly.”You forced me into it, and don’t act like you didn’t. And stop pretending that the whole thing was all about the business, when you know perfectly well that there’s a lot more than that going on.”_

_Donna sighs, suddenly exhausted. “Gordon, what are you talking about now?”_

_“I’m talking about the fact that you’ve more or less been in love with Cameron ever since you started working with her at Mutiny. I think half the reason you did what you did is because you just don’t want to admit that.”_

_Donna stares at Gordon, shocked out of her anger. “Where the hell did_ that _come from? This is just more of your fucking paranoia, and it’s getting more and more insane. I never should have told you about Deborah. It was a little fling, and it didn’t mean anything at all. Have you just been picturing me lusting after women for the past fifteen years?”_

_Gordon suddenly sits down at the kitchen table, looking so tired that Donna is worried about him in spite of herself. “I’m not talking about ‘other women,’ and I’m not talking about lust. I’m talking about Cameron. She’s the one that you’re emotionally invested in, not me. You might not see it, but I see it. And if you can do what you did to her, you can do it . . . to anyone.” He stops looking at Donna as he says this._

_Donna suddenly can’t seem to find enough air in the room to breathe properly. She stares at Gordon with a combination of rage, sadness, and some sort of fear that she tries to shrug off as soon as she feels its prickle. She turns and walks out of the kitchen without a word._

Donna doesn’t tell Cameron about this last part of that fight with Gordon, and she hasn’t thought about it in years. But for some reason, right now she can hear Gordon’s accusation as though it were happening all over again. She had written it off at the time as yet another one of Gordon’s illness-induced delusions, but now things seem so upside down that she isn’t sure about anything at all: is it possible that what she thinks she feels now about Cameron had always been there somewhere, buried deeper than she could really access? Is it possible that Gordon had seen something that she didn’t? Donna sighs. There’s really no reason to try to figure out the past, when the present and future are more than complicated enough for anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a long time, I thought that voting Cam out of Mutiny was the one thing that Donna and Cameron would never be able to talk about. But eventually, I decided that they *had* to confront it if they were ever going to move forward into a new type of relationship. So here it is (and I admit, I do enjoy the idea that Gordon accused Donna of being in love with Cameron!)


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron recognizes a familiar tune.

For the rest of her life, Cameron would remember the evening of October 22, 1995 as a dark and stormy night. In point of fact, it was actually a gray and misty night, the sort of night that was about as unremarkable in the Bay area as it was possible for a night to be. But in retrospect, it always _felt_ like a dark and stormy night, a night like the one at the beginning of _A Wrinkle in Time_ , when Mrs. Whatsit appeared at the Murrays, informing everyone about the existence of another dimension whose reality they might have sensed but never actually glimpsed.(Cameron had once tried to explain all that to Donna, including the reference to _Wrinkle_. Donna had just given her one of those _Donna_ looks, this particular one bemusement laced with utter fondness. “You’re such a geek.”)

 

**§§§**

After a hurried dinner of chili and rice, Donna and Cameron are sitting at the dining room table, arguing about the auditory quality of their online MP3 files. They’ve been at it for several hours.

“Cam, they’re fine. Nobody but you seems to be worried about the sound quality.” Donna has been saying the same thing over and over for the last week, ever since Cameron became fixated on making their music sound just a little bit better than it does right now.

“They’re _fine_ , sure, but is fine good enough?” Cam knows that MP3 files are able to be as compact as they are because they make use of lossy file compression: they take advantage of the limitations of human hearing and discard data that isn’t needed. The result is a huge reduction in file size compared to uncompressed audio, and it’s what makes MusicLand a viable web site. Still, lately, Cameron’s been imagining that she can hear real differences between MP3s and music played on old-style LPs, and it’s been bugging her more than it probably should.

Donna sighs, exasperated. “You’re turning into one of those audiophiles right before my eyes. Since when did you have such a delicate ear? I don’t think that the punk you blasted into your headphones at Mutiny required . . . nuance.”

Cameron ignores her. “It would be better if we improve the sound quality and still have the small size, wouldn’t it? Higher quality is always better.”

Donna shakes her head. “Sure, theoretically. But if the ‘better’ is such a tiny improvement that nobody can really detect it, it’s just not a good use of our resources. And of course, there’s a limit to how much we can fiddle with the MP3 format, anyway; we don’t own it.”

“Well, if we came up with something even better than the MP3, we could develop it ourselves or partner with Brandenburg for a next generation MP3. There would be plenty of options.” Cam is getting a little annoyed that Donna isn’t seeing what’s perfectly clear to her.

“Where is all this coming from, Cam? We’ve been working with the MP3 format for months. Why are you suddenly so worried about it?” Donna genuinely looks mystified.

Cam sighs to herself; it’s a fair question. She’s not exactly sure what’s going on with her right now, either. She’s been throwing herself into work for the last couple of weeks, even more than she usually does. Cameron hasn’t had the time or energy to think of anything much besides MusicLand, and she hasn’t paused to wonder why that might be. She shakes off the little seeds of wondering now. “I dunno. It just seems important for some reason.”

It’s lame and vague, but Donna doesn’t pursue it any further. “Ok, look, what I think we should do is just listen to a couple of MP3’s of songs together, and just see if we really think there’s a problem there. Does that sound ok?”

Cameron nods. “Yeah, that sounds ok. Why don’t you dig up something to play, and I’ll go get us a snack.Maybe something slow and acoustic—that should let us hear a difference, if there’s anything to hear.”

“I can certainly find something like that. And yeah, snacks are always good,” says Donna. “How about some of that chocolate cake that Haley made?And milk?”

Cameron goes into the kitchen, cuts a couple of slices of cake, puts them on plates, and pours two glasses of milk. Balancing them carefully, she walks back toward the dining room, ready to start the listening session with Donna.

And then she hears it.

 _I want to hold the hand inside you_  
_I want to take a breath that's true_  
_I look to you and I see nothing  
_ _I look to you to see the truth_

And, as if the beginning lyrics of “Fade into You” area time machine, Cameron finds herself transported abruptly back to the night when, having spent a perfectly wonderful, ridiculously weird, utterly improbable day together, she and Donna listened to that song together in muzzy silence. And just as suddenly, Cameron can’t breathe; she feels as though she’s actually drowning, but in the flickering emotions of memories rather than in water.

 _So yeah, I’m somebody’s mother, and you could use one right now, because frankly, you’re a mess. . . .But I have to tell you, my code was never like yours. Yours is . . . well, it’s like a piece of music. You should go home, sleep. Maybe eat some real food. . . .(They’re driving all night to Comdex, and her head is just barely touching Donna’s shoulder for most of the trip.) . . .(Donna in her cast, coming into Mutiny for the very first time.) . . .You said I didn’t have to wait to be asked, right? . . . I wasn’t judging. I’m just used to looking at Gordon. . . .We talked about being in this together. We talked about communication being key. This? This isn’t what we talked about. . . . Do you want me to apologize again? This hurts me too. We’re partners. . . .  (Donna’s face, pale, illuminated by the glowing light of the Planned Parenthood sign.) That’s not why I’m doing this. . . .You _are _a part of it. You built this place. . . .I don’t know that Gordon and I love each other anymore. And I don’t know . . . I don’t know if we can fix it, and I don’t even know if I want to fix it. . . .(Donna wiping her lipstick off right before they pitched to Diane for the first time.) . . .She thinks we’re a couple. . . .(Donna’s eyes, filled with tears.) So, I guess we’re likea bank now. That’s pretty cool, huh?. . .I think that’s . . . probably because I lied to you. I hate it. It’s been uncomfortable and awful and I hate it. . . .You want it, you got it. But I will not sit by and watch this company die because it’s being held hostage by a petulant child. If we don’t move forward with the IPO then you can steer this ship into the rocks yourself because I am out of here. . .Ok, look, I . . . I came to see you. . . . So let’s fix it. I want to fix it. . . .Oh, Cam . . . I picked up the phone so many times. .. .But last night we talked, it was good. I don’t understand . . . Jesus, I was trying to help you. All I was ever trying to do was help you. . . . I was hoping you could talk a bit about the relationship between a creator such as yourself and the business side of gaming. You seemed to indicate earlier that there was some difficulty for you there, and I was wondering if you felt you had any culpability in that. . . .I don’t know what you’re doing, but stay out of my business and stay out of my life. . . .(Donna’s face as she turns back after walking away from the Airstream picnic table: hesitant, unsure, longing.) . . .I finished the game. . . .I miss you, too. . . .God, I miss that._ Doing _things. . . . So I’m . . . not a . . . parasite? . . .You know, some things just aren’t the right fit. . . . Drive safe, ok? I’m, uh, I’m gonna miss you. . . . The one constant is this, it’s you, it’s us. The project gets us to the people. . . People like my last and best partner, Cameron Howe. . . .I can’t tell you what it means to me that you asked. I think in some ways I’ve probably been waiting for years to hear that. . . .What would it be? If we were to do it all over again? . . . I have an idea._

Then, faster and faster, like a roller coaster gaining speed as it shoots on a downward path, Cameron is seeing images of the past year: Donna coming to Florida, Donna at Cameron’s mother’s house, Donna and Cameron driving back to California ( _Cameron . . . you . . . I mean . . . you know that you’re beautiful, right?_ ), starting Phoenix, Chicken Marbella, Haley, Joanie, Nick at Nite . . .everything. And suddenly, with a gasp of air, Cameron realizes what has been tugging at her for the past weeks, the past months, possibly the entire past year.

She loves Donna. Cameron has thought this before, of course, realized how important a friend Donna has become to her, more important than any friend she’s ever had in her life. But this is . . . different. She _loves_ Donna. She is _in love_ with Donna. She doesn’t know why it has taken her so long to see it, but now that she does, the world is entirely different from the way it had been mere moments ago. Later, much later, when the portion of her brain that analyzes things rationally regains a modicum of control, it will explain to her over and over the obvious absurdity of this revelation. But right now, there is nothing in place to urge Cameron to waver at all from what she knows to be the absolute, complete, and utter truth of the matter. She, Cameron Howe, is in love with Donna Emerson.

With another gasp of air (how long has she been standing here, trying to breathe?), the roller coaster is speeding down another path, and Cameron is seeing the future. These images are hazier than the others, but even more emotionally intense, and they’re the sort of completely pedestrian, goofily romantic, boringly everyday things that she never would have thought possible for her brain to conjure up as a fantasy. And yet, here they are, in 1950s-style technicolor glory.

“Cameron?”

As if from a great distance, Cameron hears Donna—the real Donna, not the one insider her head—saying something to her. She blinks, and then she sees Donna as if she’s never seen her before, in jeans and a t-shirt, frowning at the computer, wisps of red hair falling into her eyes, the rest of it drawn into a pony tail. She has never, never appeared so beautiful to Cameron.

Donna pauses the music and looks at Cameron, clearly puzzled. “Cam?”

Cameron blinks, steps forward . . . and walks directly into the side of the door, which smacks her squarely on the forehead. Milk and chocolate cake go flying, glass and plates shatter, and Cameron claps her hand to her forehead automatically, without really feeling the pain.

“Jesus Christ, Cameron! Are you ok?” Donna is leaping up and moving toward her, frightened. Cam backs away, feeling as though she will literally explode if Donna touches her. Somehow, from somewhere, she finds her voice.

“Sorry—I’m fine. Watch it, there’s broken stuff all over. Let me get a broom . . .” Cameron turns away blindly, trying to breathe normally, suddenly feeling the sharp throb on her forehead.

“Just . . . sit down. I’ll clean up in a minute. Let me look at your head.” And now Donna is next to Cam, pushing her gently toward the dining room table. Numbly, Cam lets her do it, feels herself sinking into a chair, feels Donna’s hand, gentle on her forehead, touching, searching, soothing.

“It’s ok, really . . . it was stupid. I was just listening to the song, and . . .” Cameron hears herself saying this, as if she is listening to someone else speak.

“You already have a pretty big lump. Do you feel nauseous?Double vision? Anything like that?” Donna is looking at her worriedly.

Suddenly, Cameron comes back to herself and has to smile. “Donna. You’re not really a doctor, you know? Everything you’ve picked up about concussions comes from watching _E.R._ ”

Donna smiles back at her, looking a fraction less anxious. “Don’t knock _E.R._ ”

“I’m not. I have every confidence that you’ll keep me from sliding into a coma.” Donna’s fingers brush the lump on Cameron’s forehead again, and Cam feels herself trembling at the touch, for reasons that have nothing to do with her injury.

“I’m going to get you some ice. Stay right here, ok?” Donna leaves the dining room, and Cameron watches her dazedly, wondering what on earth was going to happen next. This being-in-love-with-Donna thing is going to take some serious getting used to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boom!
> 
> I always had the idea that Donna would fall in love with Cameron gradually, but never actually say "I love Cameron" to herself, and try to ignore it and push it away. Cameron, on the other hand, would be oblivious until it hit her squarely, and she'd be more inclined to act on it after that. So that's why we are where we are, and I hope it makes emotional sense to others.
> 
> stealinghome of previously.tv wanted Cameron to walk into a door when she realized she was in love with Donna. If she's reading this fic, I hope this door lived up to the one in her imagination!


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna makes a friend.

The next morning is a Monday, and Donna is up and dressed for work before Cameron, sleepy and disheveled, shuffles into the kitchen. There’s nothing unusual about that, but Donna is still a little concerned about last night’s head whack. She looks Cam over carefully, trying to do it as unobtrusively as possible. Cameron, however, notices the maneuver right away.

“I’m fine Donna, really. No headache or anything.” Cameron isn’t meeting her eyes when she says this, which in itself is worrying. Nevertheless, there’s nothing Donna can do right now other than believe that what Cameron says is actually true.

Donna nods, eyes Cam again, and decides to change the subject to work. “We have the meeting with Katie today, at lunch. Where do you think we should go?”

Cam stares at Donna, and it’s apparent that she’s totally forgotten about the fact that they had asked Dr. Katie Herman if she would be interested in consultant work to help organize MusicLand’s classification categories, and that she would be in town today to discuss the details. “Um . . .”

No question: Cameron is definitely off this morning. Worried again, Donna can’t stop herself from asking about it. “Cam? Are you really ok?”

Cam moves abruptly toward the refrigerator to get some orange juice, turning her back to Donna as she does so. “I’m totally fine. I just kind of have something to do this afternoon, and I was going to ask you if it would be ok if I skipped out on coming to Symphonic today. Is there any way you could meet Katie without me?”

Donna has been counting on Cam to help her through some of the awkwardness that a meeting with Katie would undoubtedly entail. She still has the nagging sense that she ought to keep Katie in her life (not that Katie ever _was_ in her life, exactly) both because Gordon would have wanted it that way and because both Joanie and Haley had obviously bonded with her. Yet it wasn’t going to be easy, and Cam had, after all, known Katie much better than she had. “Really? You can’t push it off?” Donna really wants to know what Cameron could possibly have to do during afternoon Phoenix time, time that neither of them ever think about missing. But since Cam doesn’t volunteer it, she feels uncomfortable about asking.

Cameron looks at her pleadingly. “I really . . . have to do this thing. It’s sort of . . . I’ll definitely be there at any follow-up meeting that we have with her, and this one is really just to talk about the big picture. You’ll be ok, right?”

Donna sighs inwardly. She can see that whatever is going on is really important to Cameron for some reason, and she also can see that Cam just doesn’t want to talk about it. For a second, Donna wonders if it has anything to do with Joe. That would make sense, because Cameron has been acting a little peculiar ever since she called him up a couple of weeks ago. Because the thought of that unsettles her, Donna pushes it aside and refuses to think about it. “Yeah. It’ll be fine. It’s just lunch.” Cam bites her lower lip, her unerring tell of some sort of turmoil, and Donna can see that Cam knows that Donna really doesn’t think that it will actually be fine at all.

Donna decides to be a little noble and let Cam off the hook. “Really, it’s ok. I think we’ll go to that new Thai place on Stockton—what do you think?”

Cameron looks distinctly relieved. “That sounds perfect. I’ll be done with my stuff by the time you get home from work, and you can tell me all about it.”

 

**§§§**

Donna arrives at Chao Yum Thai a few minutes before noon, and she sees that Katie is already there and seated at a table in the back of the restaurant.At just that moment Katie looks up, spies Donna, and gives her a little wave.

Donna walks over and settles into the seat across from Katie. “Hi.” She’s grateful for the table, because it saves her from the social awkwardness of not knowing whether they’re supposed to hug, shake hands, or just nod to each other.

Looking a little nervous herself, Katie smiles and gestures toward the menu in her hand. “This place looks great. I love Thai food.”

Donna picks up her own menu and glances at it. “Yeah, me too.”

“Are we waiting for Cameron?” Katie peers around Donna, looking toward the door.

Donna shakes her head. “Cam had an unexpected meeting that she couldn’t get out of. She was really sorry to miss you.” Donna wonders whether Katie had also been expecting to have Cameron serve as a buffer during this lunch.

Katie, however, doesn’t appear overly alarmed.“I’m sorry to have missed her, too, but I’m sure we’ll get a chance to see each other later. I’ll be in town until the weekend.” She studies her menu, and Donna is glad to be able to kill a few moments by doing the same.

Donna takes a breath; she’s the one who asked Katie to lunch, and she needs to be the one to facilitate it. “How are things going for you in Seattle?”

“Good. Great, really.” Katie looks up from her menu as she says it, directly meeting Donna’s eyes for the first time. “Some of my old friends from grad school are there, and it’s been fun reconnecting with them. I really needed a big change, after everything that happened here.” She doesn’t elaborate, but of course Donna knows exactly what she’s talking about; if she were Katie, she’d feel the same way. _Katie and Gordon really only dated for a couple of months,_ she thinks. _They deserved much more time than that._

Donna tries to put some of her thoughts into the sort of words that would be appropriate for a relationship with this woman whom she barely knows. “I know what you mean. I didn’t go anywhere new after Gordon died, but my life is completely different now than it was then, and it’s been helping.”

Katie nods and takes a sip from her water glass. “I was really glad to get your email about this consulting gig. I hadn’t written to Haley or Joanie, and I was feeling pretty bad about that. Now I’ll have more of an excuse to be in touch with them. I . . . I miss them, but talking to them would have been hard, so of course I took the cowardly path and just didn’t even try.”

Donna feels a wave of understanding and kinship pass through her; she certainly knows what it’s like to hide from things that are difficult. “They’ll be glad to hear from you, especially Haley. She really seems to care about you a lot.” Talking about her daughters makes Donna feel less awkward.

Katie gives Donna an appreciative look and then clears her throat. “So . . . I guess we should talk about what you have in mind for MusicLand. The site is incredible, by the way. I’m really excited to be working on it, even as a consultant.”

Talking about work is the easiest thing of all. “Cam and I have been realizing lately just how hard it is to classify some music. Sometimes it’s easy enough—Bach and Mozart won’t ever be anything except classical—but sometimes it’s really hard to decide if something is pop or rock or country or folk, since plenty of artists use elements from different genres. We want you to help us come up with a streamlined, elegant classification system that can use multiple tags and that will be easy for users to manage.”

They discuss possibilities until the waitress comes to take their orders (Katie goes with vegetable Pad Thai, and Donna decides to try the green curry chicken.)Donna is impressed with Katie’s ideas, and with Katie in general: she’s sharp and thoughtful, and Donna is already glad that she decided to ask for her help. So far, everything is working out well.

After the food arrives, talk turns to restaurants, then to cooking, and from there it circles back naturally to Gordon. “One of the best things about Gordon was how much he loved to cook. I’m not a cook at all, but I love food, so that worked out pretty well for me.” Katie sounds as though she’s remembering something pleasant rather than something sad, and Donna is glad about that.

“Gordon didn’t get serious about cooking until after we were divorced, so I missed all that. He did make me a dinner or two afterwards, and I was pretty amazed at how good he’d gotten at it, after just a few classes.” Donna especially recalls the dinner that Gordon had cooked after the first day of the browser meetings, a day that had proved so challenging and had gone so badly; it had cheered her up more than she ever would have thought possible.

“Do you cook?” Katie is looking at her, and Donna wonders what expression her face might have betrayed as she remembered that dinner with Gordon.

Before she can stop herself, Donna snorts. “Nope, not really at all. I mean, I have a few standard things that I can make, but I’ve never liked it and never been very good at it. It’s too bad, because I like to eat, too.”

Katie appears to consider this. “What do you do now? I mean, it’s just you and Haley, right? Does Haley sometimes cook?”

“Yeah, sometimes. And I’ll do a couple of dinners, we do takeout a couple of times a week, and even Cam . . .” Donna trails off, suddenly wondering what Katie might think about their little makeshift family.

Katie does indeed look a little curious. She doesn’t ask anything, but Donna feels as though she has to explain a bit nonetheless. “It’s just . . . ever since we started Phoenix and built MusicLand, it’s mostly been me and Cam, working a couple of hours during the day and then more hours at night. We’ve hired some consultants to help with the coding, but we don’t have any fulltime employees yet. Anyway, Cam and I would work at my house until pretty late at night, and it just didn’t seem to make sense for her to drive all the way back to her trailer at two in the morning. So she started crashing with us, and . . .” Donna feels as though she might be babbling, or over-explaining, or both.

But Katie just smiles. “Actually, that sounds really nice. I wouldn’t mind something like that at all . . . work that you like, a good friend to do it with, people you care about at home. That’s pretty great.”

Donna nods, relieved at being understood. “It _has_ been great, really great. it’s just that it’s . . . unusual.”

“Nothing wrong with unusual,” Katie says, taking a bite of her Pad Thai. “If you’re happy, fuck usual.”

It’s the sort of straightforward sentiment of support that one might hear from a good friend, and it both startles and energizes Donna. All at once, she feels a great desire to talk about Cameron with some other human being. _I don’t really have friends besides Cameron and maybe Diane,_ she thinks. _And I can’t talk to either one of_ them _about Cameron._ Talking to Katie about Cam would be completely inappropriate; this was a business meeting, after all, a business meeting with someone that she’s actually only met a few times, someone who had been dating her ex-husband. They’re certainly not _friends_. And yet . . . and yet . . .

Donna looks at Katie, calculating just how weird it would be if she were to confess to her just a tiny portion of her anxieties about Cameron. She settles on something relatively neutral. “I’m happy. We’ve gotten pretty . . . close, building up the business over the past year.”

Katie nods, as if she understands that perfectly. “Gordon told me a little bit about you and Cameron. I know that it couldn’t have been easy, after all that.”

Donna flinches a little, wondering just how much Katie knew, how bad Gordon might have made her look. _Just the bare bones of the truth would certainly have made me look bad enough_ , she thinks. Katie’s face, however, gives away nothing at all.

“It wasn’t easy, but it was . . . really, it was the best thing that happened to me since Gordon and I got divorced, getting back together with Cameron. I didn’t realize how much I missed her until it all sort of exploded inside me, and then it was everywhere, deafening.” Donna is surprised to hear something so honest and raw coming from her lips, but there’s something about this lunch with Katie that apparently is compelling the truth out of her.

“I’ll bet.” Katie fiddles with a swirl of Pad Thai without eating it. “I had a fight with my best friend from college a couple of years after we graduated, and we never really made up after that. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life.”

Donna nods. “Right now, everything is so good with the business, and with . . . just having Cameron around at home. But . . .”

Katie looks at her. “But . . . ?”

Donna takes a breath. “It’s just that . . . Cameron isn’t the sort of person to stay with one thing, one person, one place for very long. She’s always been restless: she was the one who wanted us to pack up Mutiny and move to California; when everything with Mutiny fell apart she went to Tokyo; when her marriage ended she came back to California . . . I just wonder how long . . .”

Katie finishes the sentence. “How long she’ll be sticking with you this time.” She’s silent, and then she continues. “I don’t know Cameron very well, not really. But I have a feeling that she _wants_ to find somewhere that she can stick. She doesn’t want to keep running.”

Donna thinks about that, wonders if Katie is right. But there’s no guarantee, even if Cam wants that, that Phoenix (and Donna) will be her landing point. “There’s also Joe.” Donna really can’t believe that this sentence actually came out of her mouth, since she hasn’t really articulated it fully inside of her head.

“You think that Cameron wants to get back together with him?” Katie’s voice is matter-of-fact, but just hearing the question makes Donna’s heart lurch a little.

She nods. “They just have this on-again, off-again thing, and I think they might be one of those couples where it’s never _really_ over. I know that Cam thinks it is, but there are just some people that are always drawn to each other, no matter what. And I know she called him a couple of weeks ago.” Donna can’t believe how jealous, how needy, how ridiculous she’s sounding. She takes a bite of her chicken to cover up some of her embarrassment.

Katie, however, doesn’t appear to be feeling anything except genuinely sympathetic. “You want everything in your life right now to stay exactly the same. That’s how you can tell that you’re really happy. I was that way right before Gordon . . .” She stops and looks away, but then looks back at Donna and smiles a little wistfully.

Donna nods, looking sympathetic herself. “Yeah, that’s it exactly.If I could bottle right now and keep it forever, I’d be happy to do that. I don’t think I need anything else, even though that sounds weird. I mean, I haven’t even gone on a date since Cameron and I started Phoenix, and I haven’t even wanted to. But Cam . . . well, I have no idea how much Cam wants to keep things the way they are, or even if she wants that at all.

“That’s a hard thing to talk about directly, of course.” Katie’s voice is thoughtful. “You can’t really go to someone and say, ‘So, this funny little thing that we have going, how would you like to keep doing it forever? Does forever work for you?’”

Donna shakes her head and smiles sadly. “Yeah. So all I can do is wait it out and hope that it lasts awhile. And maybe it will.”

“Ok, just for you, since I’m sure you’ll love to hear it, I’m going to give you my philosophy of life and relationships.” Katie sounds completely serious, as if what she’s about to say does indeed contain deep universal truths. “We all always think that our relationships with other people are going to last forever, but they almost never do. I mean, one of the happiest memories I have with Gordon was on Haley’s fifteenth birthday, when Gordon, Joe, Cam, Haley, and I launched these model rockets on Cameron’s land. It was a gorgeous day, just idyllic, and we were all so happy and so _connected_ with one another. But all that just disappeared, and really soon afterwards. Gordon died, I moved away, Cam and Joe broke up. It was all just . . . gone.”

Donna nods. This is really her greatest fear, and she thinks to herself that this philosophy of Katie’s is pretty damn depressing.

Katie must see that in Donna’s expression, because she gives her a half-grin. “I’m not done. But with you and Cameron, it’s sort of the opposite. You have this connection that _should_ have broken, that had every reason to break, but it didn’t. It’s obviously incredibly, impossibly strong, and I just don’t think you have to worry about it after everything you’ve been through. You’re both going to be fine.” Katie sounds extremely confident, so confident that Donna believes her just a little bit.

“Thanks.” Donna wishes she could say more, but her throat is a little too tight for that.

Katie gives her a small smile and then changes the subject gracefully. “So, I think I should write up the categorization ideas for MusicLand that we batted around today and email them to you, so you and Cameron can look them over. Once we agree on an approach, I’ll draft something that’s more detailed. Does that sound ok?”

Donna nods. “That sounds perfect. This has been . . . really terrific.” And it has, Donna thinks. She thinks that, unlikely as it probably is, she and Katie might actually end up being friends. _Gordon would have found that very funny_ , she thinks. _But I think he probably would have liked it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think that Donna needs a friend who isn't Cameron; she can't keep absolutely everything bottled up forever. I like Katie, and I wanted her back in the mix, so there we are. (And where is Cameron going? Tune in next week to find out--same bat time, same bat channel!)


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron asks permission.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A dollop of magical realism never hurt anyone.

Watching Donna leave for the office, Cameron sighs. She knows how difficult that lunch meeting with Katie is probably going to be, and she’s also certain that Donna must be completely baffled by her behavior. _Just great,_ she thinks to herself. _It’s not even twenty-four hours of being-in-love-with-Donna, and I’m already messing up._ But it can’t be helped.

Once she sees that Donna has driven away, Cameron rises from the kitchen table, goes into her bedroom, and grabs an old joystick from her dresser drawer.Then she gets into her truck and quickly drives the twelve miles to the quiet cemetery just outside of the city limits.It doesn’t take long for her to find the gravestone that she’s looking for.

 **Gordon Clark  
** **June 7, 1953 - April 14, 1994**

Cam touches the top of the stone. For some reason, she’s certain that the person she needs right now is Gordon, and this is about as close to him as she’s going to get. She slides down with her back to the grave and takes the joystick out of her backpack. Closing her eyes, she fiddles with the toggle, feeling suddenly exhausted. It had been a long, sleepless night, and (despite what she had told Donna) she does still have a dull, throbbing headache from walking into the door the night before. As her thumb traces the outline of the joystick, images of hours and hours of games with Gordon—Super Mario Brothers, Donut Plains 3, Doom—flicker inside her brain.  
  
****

**§§§**

She feels him there before he says anything.

_“Hey. It’s about time you came to see me.”_

_Cam smiles. “I’ve been here plenty of times. You just never showed up before.”_

_“Well, I’m here now.” Gordon settles down next to her, and Cameron feels that sentence echoing over and over, already imprinted on her mind from a long ago conversation with Donna._

_“I only brought one joystick,” Cameron says, feeling a little lost._

_Gordon shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t need them anymore. You wouldn’t believe the sorts of games that I’ve been playing.”_

_“I’ll bet.Let’s see how good you’ve gotten. Death match?” Cameron looks at Gordon, realizing that for some reason she can’t quite make out his face, even though she can hear him clearly._

_“That’s ironic, but sure.”_

_Cameron grins, and they play together in companionable silence for a few moments._

_After awhile, Gordon pauses the game. “So . . . what’s up, Cam? These sorts of connections are hard to make these days. You must have a real reason, or we wouldn’t be here right now.”_

_Cameron takes a breath. “I guess . . . I wanted to ask you something. Or maybe tell you something, and then ask you something.”_

_Gordon unpauses the game, and Cameron watches as his avatar shoots across a screen that has somehow appeared in front of them. She marvels at the amazing colors and clarity (is it in three dimensions? More than three?) of this game, one that she somehow knows how to play even though she’s never seen it before. She’s no match for Gordon, though, who dodges Cam’s avatar easily, apparently scoring a point against her. “Go ahead. I’m all ears.”_

_Cameron decides to plunge in. “So, it seems like . . . I’m kind of in love with Donna.” She waits, wondering what Gordon would say to her bombshell._

_He keeps playing for awhile without comment. But Cameron soon hears what could only be described as a chuckle. “I guess I’m supposed to be shocked?”_

_Cameron looks at the shimmering outline of Gordon next to her, feeling irritated. “Well, that would be a reasonable reaction, unless you have some sort of omniscience thing going on now.”_

_“Nope, that’s not how it works. But let’s just say that I had my . . . suspicions, and I had them for quite awhile. It’s just always nice to be right, even now.” Gordon sounds about as smug as he ever sounded when he was actually alive._

_Cameron can’t help rolling her eyes at that. “Ok, well, glad to be of service in keeping your ego intact. But it’s a little weird for me, even if it’s just business as usual for you.”_

_Gordon pauses the game again, and Cam senses that he’s looking directly at her now. “Sorry. I remember what being in love with Donna is like.” Gordon’s voice sounds wistful. “But you’ll need to catch me up. The last I heard, you two weren’t even on speaking terms. How long has it been, anyway?”_

_Cameron thinks it’s odd that he wouldn’t know that, but then again, she has no idea what the rules are for him now. “Since you . . . died, you mean? A year and a half.”_

_“Hmm,” Gordon says, and Cameron feels his grin even though she can’t quite see it. “It was me, wasn’t it? You guys bonded over how much you missed me. I’m just glad I could help you along. It makes it all worth it in the end. It’s beautiful, really.” He’s actually chortling now._

_Cam shakes her head, marveling at how very much Gordon is still Gordon. “Shut up.” But Cameron is smiling as she says it, thinking about how great it is to have Gordon back, even if it’s probably not real, even if it’s definitely only for a little while._

_“Seriously, Cam,” says Gordon, and he does sound serious all of a sudden. “I’m really happy it worked out that way.That’s how it should be. You and Donna deserve a happy ending after all that you’ve been through.”_

_Cameron shrugs. “It’s just . . . I don’t know what to do about it. It just sort of hit me all at once yesterday, and it’s . . . a lot.” She hesitates. “How did you tell Donna that you were in love with her? I mean, what was it like for you guys?”_

_Gordon sighs. “It was easy for me. We were in a couple of the same comp sci classes, and she just lit up the room. It was mostly guys in those classes, and none of the few other women looked like Donna. But it wasn’t just that she was beautiful—she was really smart, a lot smarter than I was. I think I loved her almost before we said anything to each other. I told her for the first time the summer after we started dating.”_

_“Did she tell you that she loved you then, too?” Cameron isn’t sure why she’s so curious about this, but since Gordon is willing to talk, she wants to hear as much as he wants to tell her._

_“She did. That summer was pretty special for both of us, when it was just the two of us. It got harder after Donna got pregnant with Joanie.” Gordon starts playing the game again and doesn’t say anything else for a moment or two._

_Cameron isn’t sure how to react to that. “Yeah. I can imagine. You both were pretty young for all that responsibility.”_

_Gordon shrugs and doesn’t respond for a moment. “I don’t think people are ever really ready for kids. You just fake it until you make it. But anyway, what did you want to ask me? You said you wanted to tell me something and then ask me something. What’s the ask?”_

_Cameron takes a breath. “I wanted to ask you . . . if this is ok with you. I mean, if you’re ok with me and Donna. I mean, if there ends up being a me and Donna, which there might not, because I have no idea how she feels about it. But just in case . . . are you?”_

_Cameron feels the warmth of Gordon’s smile again. “Bro code?”_

_Cam nods. “Yeah. Exactly.”_

_“Very thoughtful. It’s ok with me. In fact, it’s great with me. I like the idea of you and Donna together. If this were Joe coming to me about being with Donna, I’d have a whole different answer.” Gordon sounds as though he’s half-joking, but only half._

_Cameron shudders at the idea of Donna and Joe as a couple. She’s totally with Gordon on that one._

_"But,” Gordon continues, “there are a couple of conditions.” Gordon stops playing, and Cameron suddenly feels the weight of his full attention._

_Cameron sighs.Of course there would have to be conditions.“Ok. Tell me.”_

_“First, you have to really listen to Donna. She’s not great at saying things directly, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not feeling a lot that she can’t let herself talk about.” Gordon’s voice is low and solemn, as if he wants to make absolutely sure that his meaning is clear._

_Cameron, however, brushes it off impatiently. “I listen to her all the time. You have no idea how much we’ve talked over the past year.”_

_“Maybe you have, but I’m willing to bet that if you’re in love with Donna, she’s feeling a lot more about you than you can possibly imagine.” Gordon sounds so certain about this that Cameron half-wonders if he’s had conversations with Donna similar to the one they’re having right now._

_“So . . . ok, fine. I’ll listen to her.” And she would, she promises herself. Right now, she can’t imagine ever NOT wanting to listen to anything and everything Donna has to say to her. She’d be happy, she thinks, to do nothing but listen to Donna for the rest of her life._

_Gordon shrugs. “Look, you might think this is going to be easy, but it won't be. Donna isn’t an easy person, but then, you’re not easy, and I wasn’t easy either. Easy is probably overrated. I just know that I really messed up giving her what she needs, and I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you. It’s just . . . really tricky.”_

_“What is?” This wasn’t the sort of conversation that she and Gordon had ever had when he was alive._

_“Balancing what you need and what the other person needs. This epiphany of yours, you think that realizing that you love Donna is this huge, all-encompassing thing. And it is, but there’s so much more that comes after that.” Gordon’s words, laced with pain, have the ring of truth to them._

_Cameron thinks about this, thinks about how she and Joe never quite managed to give each other what they needed, despite the fact that they really loved each other. “Is this some kind of wisdom from beyond the grave?”_

_Gordon shimmers as he shakes his head at her. “Who knows? I might not even be really here at all; I might be just a figment of your imagination, and you might be having a conversation with yourself. Let’s just call it . . . wisdom.”_

_Cameron nods, wondering if she is just talking to herself, wondering (if she is), where all her insight into Donna is coming from. “So what’s the other condition?”_

_“The second condition is, if you hurt Donna in any way, in ANY way, I’m going to have to kill you with a shovel.” Gordon says this matter-of-factly, as though it’s a perfectly reasonable part of any civilized conversation._

_“With a shovel? Why a shovel? There have to be better ways to kill people than that.” Cameron can’t picture Gordon beating her to death with a shovel, but things might be different now._

_“Sorry,” Gordon says. “The shovel thing hasn’t happened yet; you’ll understand it in a few years. Time works differently for me now.”_

_“Huh? You mean, you can see the future?” Cameron wonders if Gordon knows exactly how it works out between her and Donna, and she finds the thought unsettling._

_Gordon seems to know what she has in mind (and whether he’s real or a product of her imagination, that makes sense either way). “Nope, it doesn’t work like that. I don’t know a thing about anyone I cared about, but I could tell you the plots of the next fifteen Star Wars movies and the names of the next five presidents. And man, there’s one that you just would not believe.” Cameron feels Gordon shudder, but she’s too busy pondering the idea of fifteen new Star Wars movies to pay much attention to it._

_Cameron’s mind snaps back to the reason behind the killing-her-with-a-shovel comment. “I’m not going to hurt Donna. I’d never do that.”_

_“You did it once. You broke her, you know.” Gordon says it kindly, but it hits Cameron hard. She generally tries not to think about just what pushing Donna out of the browser project had probably done to her._

_“She hurt me, too.” Cameron’s voice is sharp, and she curses herself as soon as it’s out of her mouth. This was not at all what she wants to be talking about right now with Gordon._

_“I know,” Gordon answers. “But this is kind of what I mean about listening to her. You didn’t realize what a huge deal it was for Donna to come find you at Comdex with that idea. That was her way of saying how sorry she was, and how much she missed you, but she couldn’t find any other way to do that. I know that it’s partially her fault, but I just don’t want you to make the same mistakes with her that I made. I hardly ever managed to hear what she was trying to tell me, but you can be better than I was. And you should.”_

_Cameron sighs. “Or else you’ll kill me with a shovel.”_

_“Right. Or maybe I’ll just haunt you forever.” Gordon is laughing again._

_“I wouldn’t mind that at all.I . . . I really miss you.” And she really does._

_“Right back at you.” Cameron feels a flash of warmth from him._

_“So . . . what now? I just don’t know what to do. All of this is weird. I mean, who would have expected this, after everything that’s happened?” Now that she has Gordon’s blessing, the full enormity of what she’s facing is hitting her. Cam is starting to feel at wit’s end. What now, indeed?_

_“Well, like I said,_ I _would have expected it, but we don’t need to dwell on my genius.” Cam rolls her eyes again and grins in spite of herself as Gordon continues. “You need to talk to Donna about it, tell her what’s going on, how you’re feeling. Believe me, keeping it bottled up isn’t going to help anybody.” Gordon sounds very sure of himself, much more sure than Cameron ever remembered him sounding before._

_Cameron thinks about just how hard that was going to be. After all, you can’t just walk up to someone and tell them that, out of the clear blue sky, you’re in love with them, can you? “Yeah, I guess you’re right, but I’m not sure how exactly I’m going to do that.”_

_“You’ll figure it out.” Gordon’s voice is fading a little, and Cameron knows somehow that their time is nearly up. A wave of sadness washes over her._

_“Can I . . . talk to you more, later? I mean, just for a little while?” Cam thinks about how much easier everything would be if she did have Gordon to talk to, all the time, whenever she wanted. Why had she wasted all of those years in Japan with just an occasional email? She is suddenly filled with regret at the amount of time that she’s wasted with everyone, Donna included._

_“Well, you can always try the old ham.CQ, CQ! You never know; it might work.” Gordon is laughing again, but the sound of it is growing fainter and fainter._

_Cameron shrugs. “I still have that radio. I’ll try it if I get desperate enough. But Gordon . . . thank you.”_

_“Good luck. And make sure you say hi to . . .” Before Gordon can finish, his voice disappears entirely._

 

**§§§**

Opening her eyes, Cam can still feel Gordon, still hear his voice inside of her. Now there is nothing, she realizes, to keep her from talking to Donna about all this except herself. The thought of that is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Cameron sighs, traces the name “Gordon Clark” on the gravestone with her finger, and closes her eyes again for a second. Then she caresses the stone one last time, leaves the joystick on the top of it, and walks back to her truck, deep in thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone doesn't get the reference, here's an explanation of the [shovel talk](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Shovel_talk). Thanks for your indulgence with this chapter--I just really wanted Cam to talk to Gordon about Donna, so I willed it into existence.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein disguises are worn.

“Cameron?” Donna is growing increasingly exasperated. They’ve lined up beta testers for MusicLand’s new Broadway musicals page, but Cameron hasn’t finished code for it that should have been done at least a week ago. Even worse, Cam doesn’t seem aware of how serious a problem this really is: if they don’t have the page done on time, they’re still going to have to pay the beta testers the money they were promised for the job, and then they’ll need to spend time and more money hiring again when the page is actually ready for testing. Even worse, being late makes Phoenix look unprofessional, and Donna can put up with almost anything except that.

Cam just looks at her vaguely, and Donna feels like shaking her. This has been going on for at least a week, and Donna’s patience is running thin. Eccentricity is one thing; Donna has worked with Cameron long enough to understand her quirks, and she often (especially lately) finds those quirks endearing. But right now, Donna’s concerns about whatever demons are possessing Cam are now morphing into outright annoyance.

“Donna, I’m . . . I’m really sorry. It’ll be done tomorrow, I promise. I’ll work on it all night if I have to.” Cameron is looking at her imploringly, and Donna can’t help melting a little when she sees Cam’s stricken expression.

Donna sighs. “Cam, you’ve said that every day this week. I don’t want you killing yourself; if we can’t get it done on time, we can’t, and we’ll eat the loss. But we have to talk about this. Do we need to hire more freelance coders? Should we think about a couple of fulltime employees?It might be time.”

Cam bites her lip and runs her fingers through her hair, and Donna is suddenly aware of just how exhausted she looks. “Maybe. I don’t know . . . it’s hard to think about that right now. Let me just finish this page, and then we can talk about . . . everything else. Is that ok?”

It’s not, really, but Donna sees that it’s all that Cameron can manage right now. “Yeah, it’s fine. We can maybe talk more big picture stuff on Saturday at the Airstream. But Cam, realistically, when can you get the page done? I mean, without heroic all-nighters or anything like that?”

“I have about twenty hours of work left, maybe less. So . . . early next week? Will that be good enough?” Cam looks so upset that every drop of Donna’s irritation drains away as if it were never there at all, and Donna finds that all she really wants to do is just make Cameron feel better. _Remember what’s important_ jumps into her head from Phoenix’s vision statement. Cameron is more important than Phoenix, and Donna tells herself that she needs to keep that in mind as she rides out whatever the hell Cam is going through right now.

“It’ll be good enough,” Donna says, forcing the inevitable _It’ll have to be_ from bubbling up too far into her consciousness. She hesitates, and then adds, “Cam . . . if something’s going on with you, we should talk about that, too.”

Cameron looks at her; Donna can’t quite figure out her expression, but whatever it is, it’s intense and conflicted. “I just need to concentrate on getting this work done right now. After that, yeah, maybe we can talk about stuff.” Cameron doesn’t say more than that, but Donna’s heart sinks a little at the admission that there is “stuff” that needs to be talked about. _Is she getting tired of working on MusicLand? Is something happening with Joe? Is she thinking about some new project of her own?_ Donna, however, orders all of these anxieties to stand down and simply nods in what she hopes is a neutral, encouraging way. Anything that Cameron wants to discuss will be revealed in time, and all Donna can do is to brace herself for whatever might be coming next.

 

**§§§**

That evening after dinner, Donna doesn’t bring up the unfinished Broadway musicals page, and Cameron doesn’t either. Instead, they talk about the draft of Katie’s proposal for a new MusicLand classification scheme, which they just received as an email attachment that afternoon.

“It’s really good,” says Cameron, seemingly glad to be discussing something that isn’t directly about her own MusicLand work. “I like the way she lets users have the option of defining their own tags. People will really like that.”

Donna nods. “Yeah. Music organization can be so personal. We don’t want to impose structures on people that they’re going to hate, but we also need to have an overall system for the site as a whole. This might get us there.”

“I’m glad you asked Katie to do this,” Cam says. She hesitates before adding, “I’m really sorry I flaked on you for that lunch. I won’t do that again, I promise.”

Donna just looks at her, wondering if Cam’s bringing the missed lunch up is tantamount to permission for her to probe a little into the current mysteries of Cameron’s mind. She decides it’s probably best to leave it alone, hard as that is for her right now. “It’s ok. I actually kind of enjoyed talking to her alone. I feel like I know her better now, and I like her. I’m glad we’re working with her too.”

Cameron smiles at Donna, looking a fraction less tired than she’s been looking all week. “Yeah. Maybe we should have her over for dinner while she’s around, so she can catch up with Haley. I think Haley would really like that,”

“I was thinking that, too, but she’s going home to Seattle today. She’ll probably be back, though, and then we can set something up for sure.” As she often is lately, Donna is touched at just how much Cameron obviously cares about Haley.

“Anyway,” Cam continues, “I’m totally going to crank on the Broadway page tonight. And maybe I’ll skip our Phoenix lunch meeting tomorrow, just so I can really focus.”

It crosses Donna’s mind that Cam has been skipping a lot of things lately; they haven’t, for example, had one of their typical, late-night TV-watching stints all week. Donna tries not to wonder if there might be any significance to that, or if it’s all just the coincidental result of a very busy week. “Well, you can do that, of course, but tomorrow’s the Halloween thing. I was hoping you’d be there to keep me from feeling quite as stupid as I would if you weren’t.”

“The . . . Halloween thing?” Cameron is obviously trying hard to figure out just how she can hide the fact that she has no idea what Halloween thing Donna might be talking about, but she’s also completely failing.

Donna rolls her eyes. “You remember; I told you about it a couple of weeks ago. You made fun of it, as I recall.”

Some of the blankness leaves Cameron’s eyes. “Yeah, I remember now. You guys had that stupid consultant come in, and she told you that Symphonic needed to do team-building stuff for some reason. And somehow, you all decided that wearing costumes the Friday before Halloween would turn everyone into creative powerhouses. Do I have it right?” Donna is actually happy to see Cameron’s smirk, because it’s a bit of normalcy in what has been a decidedly abnormal week.

“Yeah, you do.I know you’re not a Symphonic employee, but you’re kind of an honorary one by now, and I’d really appreciate it if you just put on a mask and ate candy corn with the rest of us. It’ll only be a couple of hours out of your coding time, and at this point that shouldn’t make or break us. What do you say?” Donna isn’t sure exactly why she’s pressuring Cameron to go to a party that she’ll probably hate, when she could be finishing up coding the new page. Yet for some reason, Donna really wants Cam there with her.

Cam sighs and then nods. “Ok, whatever. But don’t expect anything elaborate. I haven’t worn a Halloween costume since I was ten, and even then I just threw together the bare minimum that would earn me candy.”

Donna grins at her. “I have every confidence in your powers of creativity.”

 

**§§§**

The next morning, Donna wakes up early to put on her costume. She’s never been a big fan of Halloween, but she’s managing partner, and she knows she has to set an example for everyone else. She regards herself doubtfully in the mirror, wondering if dressing up as Beverly Crusher from _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ was actually a good idea. Maybe she looks dorky; maybe she’ll embarrass Cameron, maybe everyone at Symphonic will politely avert their eyes and laugh at her behind her back. Oh, well; too late to do anything about it now, and after all, it’s just one day out of her life.

When Donna and Cameron meet in the kitchen, Cameron (looking at Donna with an expression that can only be described as bug-eyed, even though Donna generally scoffs at adjectives like that, ones that never seem to reflect how people genuinely react in the real world) does an actual double-take (maybe even a triple-take?) when she sees the costume. Weirdly, it also seems to be taking Cameron a moment or two to force words out of her mouth.

“What?” Donna looks at Cam curiously. What new peculiarity is possessing Cameron this morning?

“Noth . . . nothing.” Cameron isn’t meeting her eyes for some reason. “You look . . . you look good.”

Donna stares at her. “Well, thank you. I figured, you know, red hair . . . it seemed like an easy choice.”

Cam nods without saying anything. Knowing what a Trekkie Cameron is, Donna wonders if she’s gotten some detail wrong that only the Trek-obsessed would notice. She shrugs to herself, hoping that everyone else at Symphonic were at most only casual Trek fans, so she wouldn’t have to hear about how her tricorder should beep faster, or how her uniform is the wrong shade of blue.

Donna notices Cameron glancing at her quickly, eyes flicking up and down over her Dr. Crusher costume before looking away again.She shrugs again and decides not to worry about it. “So, Cam . . . any ideas for your own costume? Or are you going to surprise me at noon?”

Cam snorts. “I have one idea, but I don’t know if I’m going to have enough time to pull it together. So yeah, let’s go with my surprising you. Maybe I’ll just go as Cameron Howe from 1983, when we first met.”

Donna laughs, remembering Cameron’s short, bleach-blond hair and “Ignore Alien Orders” t-shirt. “That would be . . . interesting. And I could change my costume and go as—what did you call me?—a perfect Dillard’s housewife with big, judging eyes.”

Cameron grins. “That would be cool, but you shouldn’t change your costume. It’s really great.”

“Well, I’m delighted if it’s actually passing your Trek critique.” Donna relaxes just a fraction, glad that _something_ feels slightly normal between herself and Cameron right now.

 

**§§§**

Donna’s costume is duly admired by everyone at Symphonic. Even Trip, who arrives dressed as The Joker, looks at her appreciatively.“Cool costume. I never figured you for a Trekkie.”

“Well, I’m not one, not really. But I just felt like being Dr. Crusher, for some reason.” It crosses Donna’s mind that one possible reason is the fact that she knows just how much Cameron like Star Trek, but that would be sort of ridiculous.Why, after all, would she want to dress up for Cameron, especially when she knows that Cam would almost certainly scoff at the very idea of a Halloween costume?

Trip gives her a grin very much in keeping with his costume, almost as though he knows exactly what thought is wriggling through her mind at the moment. “Is Cameron coming in this afternoon?”

“Um, yeah, as far as I know.” Donna looks at Trip carefully, wondering why his eyes are gleaming with a little too much interest for such a casual question. God, why exactly is it that everyone and everything in her life right now seems to be a little off kilter?

Trip’s head suddenly whips toward the door of the large conference room. “Hey, speak of the devil. Or, the Mario.”

Donna follows his gaze and lands on Cameron, dressed up as Mario from Super Mario Brothers, complete with a black moustache and red plastic hat with an “M” in the middle. Looking a little embarrassed, Cam sidles up to her, grabbing a handful of peanut M&M’s on the way.

“So . . . I’ve been sort of thinking about all the video games that Gordon and I used to play when we all lived together, and, I dunno, it made me want to be Mario.” Cam looks as though she fully expects Donna to tease her, but Donna feels like doing anything other than making fun of this. She’s touched, charmed, and has to fight a serious urge to hug Cameron in front of the whole office of interested bystanders.

“It’s great. I love it.” Something about Cameron’s costume makes Donna remember all the best parts of Mutiny and allows her to forget all the worst ones. She touches Cam’s red plastic hat and is a little puzzled to see Cam flinch, as though Donna’s finger is an electric cattle prod that can melt plastic and burn its way down to human flesh. “Where did you get the hat?”

Cam shrugs. “I actually got it awhile back; traded someone online who wanted an old Led Zeppelin bootleg that I had, and I thought the hat was funny. It came in handy for a quick Halloween costume, though. Whoever would have thought that I’d need something like that?”

“It’s wonderful. You’re a perfect Mario.” Donna gives Cameron a look that she feels might be a little too emotional and sentimental for a Halloween office party, and she’s sure of it when Cameron catches her eye and holds it for a moment or two longer than might be necessary. _What is this,_ Donna wonders. _What’s the deal with her? And with me?_ Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Trip looking right at them and elbowing Tanya, elegantly disguised as Wonder Woman. Donna wonders for a second what that could be about and then shrugs it off; she has much more pressing concerns at the moment than whatever might be going on between Tanya and Trip.

 

**§§§**

When Donna gets home that evening, she is a little disappointed to see Cameron back in her usual t-shirt and jeans. “Hey, there,” she says, collapsing on the couch. “Give me a minute to change out of this thing, and then we can figure out what we’re going to have for dinner.”

Cam sits down next to her. She looks at Donna’s costume, starts to say something, and then stops. Donna turns her head to look at her. “What?”

Cameron shrugs. “Nothing. It’s just . . . I kind of like you as Beverly Crusher.”

Donna smile back at her. “Yeah, I kind of like me this way, too. I’ve always wanted to use a tricorder.”

Cam leans back against the couch and gives her a half-grin. “Dinner’s taken care of. I picked up stuff for a chef’s salad on my way home, and I hereby volunteer to throw it together for us. They say we should have green stuff a few times a week.”

“Do they?” Donna says, thinking about how glad she is that Cameron is here, fixing dinner so she doesn’t have toworry about it. She looks at Cam fondly. Whatever might be going on, at least they can still have dinner together.

Cam looks back at Donna, who can’t quite read her expression. She sees Cameron take a deep breath. “Donna . . .”

At that moment, they both hear Haley and Jordan clatter into the living room. “Hey, Mrs. Emerson, great costume!”

Donna rolls her eyes at both of them. “Well, thank you Jordan, but it looked a lot better this morning. I don’t know how all of those Star Trek uniforms on the show always look as though they’ve just been ironed.”

“Twenty-fourth century technology,” Haley says knowingly. “Those uniforms are made out of fabric that never wrinkles, fades, or makes anyone look anything other than spectacular.”

“Yeah, well, it’s too bad we have to wait four hundred years to get some of that,” says Donna, laughing. “Anyway, I’m about to go change into something from this century. Jordan, you’ll be staying for dinner?”

As Donna leaves the living room, she suddenly thinks about the fact that Cameron seemed to be about to say something, possibly something important, right before Haley and Jordan interrupted them. Whatever it was, she hopes Cam will remember it tomorrow, when they have space and time to talk during their Saturday Airstream retreat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't you just hate that trope in which a confession of love is inconveniently interrupted? I sure do! :-)


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron discovers the magic of Disney.

Since Haley and Jordan’s late-night Halloween weekend horror movie date ends up lasting early into the next morning, Saturday brunch is a noisier and somewhat more formal and civilized affair than it is when Donna, Cameron, and Haley are alone, with scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast taking the place of Pop Tarts and Cap’n Crunch. Cam sits quietly and lets the chatter wash over her. She’s thinking about how close she came last night to telling Donna everything; she had been ready to blurt it all out when Haley and Jordan came into the room, shifting the mood and jettisoning any hope of privacy. But today will be different. Today they’ll be at the Airstream, where there will be nothing to do except talk, and nobody to interrupt them when they do. Today, for sure, Cameron is going to tell Donna . . . the thing she needs her to know. Just the thought of doing that makes Cameron shiver, but she knows it has to happen: if she doesn’t do it soon, she’s very likely to explode, or bankrupt Phoenix by not getting her work done, or both. She had been, in fact, on the brink of exploding yesterday when she saw Donna dressed up as Beverly Crusher; if she had been asked to imagine a perfect fantasy of Donna, that one would definitely have made her top five. Cam had to force herself not to stare at Donna during every second of that office party, and she’s pretty impressed that she managed to do that at all.

Seeing Donna studying her now, Cameron smiles at her in what she hopes is an offhand, normal-Saturday-morning sort of way.“Hey.”

“Hey yourself. More eggs?” Cam nods and passes her plate to Donna, who puts a few heaping spoonfuls of eggs onto it. Cameron digs in, glad that eating can take the place of talking, at least for now. The eggs have plenty of cheese in them, just the way Donna knows she likes them.

Jordan and Haley leave as soon as they finish eating—they’ll be going to a Halloween party that night, and they both want to put the finishing touches on their costumes. As soon as they’re gone, Donna turns to Cameron. “You still up for an Airstream day? I think we can use it.” Her voice is a little too casual, and Cameron realizes that Donna is well aware of Cameron’s peculiar actions over the past week, even if she hasn’t said much about them to her directly.

Cameron nods. “Absolutely. I’m ready now.”

Donna looks a little relieved. “Great. Let me just grab a quick shower, and then we can get out of here.”

 

**§§§**

It’s a gorgeous day, and as soon as they get to the Airstream Donna and Cameron settle into the outside lawn chairs and just look at the view quietly together. Cam glances at Donna, wondering how she’s going to be able to bring up what they need to talk about, wondering how in hell Donna is going to react when she does.

Donna, however, is the first to say something. “I know that things have been rough for you at work for the last week or two. You don’t need to tell me what’s going on if you don’t want to, and I’m sorry if I put too much pressure on you to finish the Broadway page.” She hesitates as if she’s about to say something more, but then she just takes a sip of her iced tea and waits to hear Cam’s response.

“I know I should have gotten that page done last week. It just . . . it wasn’t coming together the way I wanted it to. I had a picture of it in my head, and I just couldn’t get that picture into what I was coding.” All of that is somewhat true, but it’s also a complete and utter lie: it isn’t Cameron’s artistic perfectionism that’s paralyzing her, it’s the fact that every bit of mental energy that she possesses has been trained on Donna all week, not on a Broadway musical web page. Inwardly, Cam also curses herself for focusing on the “work” part of what Donna has just said, rather than taking it as an opening to talk about what she _really_ wants to talk about. But maybe getting work out of the way first would be best; if she and Donna have The Talk too early, they’ll never get back to the MusicLand problems, and Cam doesn’t want to be responsible for messing up Phoenix even more than she already has. Yes, waiting a bit is the responsible thing to do, Cam decides, refusing to wonder if she’s simply chickening out on what will probably be the hardest conversation she’s ever initiated in her life.

Donna is looking at her so sympathetically that Cameron starts to feel guilty about it. “That happens to everyone who does any sort of creative work. It sucks, but you get past it.”

Cam nods, still feeling as though she’s really let Donna down. “I hate that it wasn’t finished this week. I guess I’ve gotten a little blocked, but I think I have a handle on everything now. It’ll definitely be done by early next week.”

“That’s great; most of the beta testers are still going to be available then, so it’s really not going to end up costing us much at all. And even if it did, we’re doing well enough that we can afford a hiccup every now and again. I’m sorry I get so . . . obsessed, sometimes. Tunnel vision, Gordon used to call it. Sometimes it’s rough on other people. I’m sure it was rough on him.” Donna’s voice trails off a little, as it often does when she brings up Gordon.

 _God, she’s really beautiful_ , Cameron thinks, and then is immediately irritated with her mind for drifting away from MusicLand yet again. She gives herself a mental shake to concentrate on what they’re actually discussing. “I could use some of your tunnel vision; it’s saved us lots of times. But I’m glad that the beta testing won’t be a total disaster.”

Donna smiles at her. “No, not even close. And the page is really going to be great. I mean, of course it was a natural to design an actual Broadway for Broadway musicals, but having different theaters on the street actually showing each different show . . . it’s just dynamite. People are going to love it.”

Cameron nods. She really _has_ loved designing this page. She’s never been a big fan of musicals, but the page really looks like an actual New York street at night. Each theater has a marquee with the title of a musical, and users can enter the theaters, sit in virtual seats, and listen to the music from the show with their friends. It ended up being an elaborate coding job, and it took a lot more time than Cameron had expected, even apart from her utter distraction and sleeplessness over the past week. “Thanks. It . . . it means a lot, that you really like it. I’m pretty proud of it.”

“You should be. It’s awesome.” Donna gives Cameron one of those looks that makes Cam think that maybe the I-love-you conversation won’t actually end up being a complete and utterly humiliating flop.

Cam smiles back at Donna, trying not to make it weird. “Yeah, well, it would be more awesome if it were finished, wouldn’t it?”

Donna laughs. “Well, finished is better than not finished, but an awesome unfinished page is better than a mediocre finished one. I mean, I might be a suit and a money person, but I still appreciate great work.”

Embarrassed, Cameron jumps out of the chair and looks toward the trails in the woods behind them. “Hey, let’s go for a walk, why don’t we? It’s beautiful out there. We can talk about MusicLand and get some exercise at the same time.” After the walk, she thinks, she’ll definitely tell Donna. Maybe when they get back, they can get some drinks, sit outside again, and she’ll finally be able to bring it up. But putting it off for just a little while longer sounds like the right decision for now.

 

**§§§**

They walk for a bit without saying anything, and then Donna brings up the Broadway musical page again. “You know, I’ve been trying to decide whether we should include movie soundtracks and Disney songs on the Broadway page, or whether they need pages of their own. Including them would be cheaper, of course, but I’m not totally sure it’s right.”

Cam stares at her, almost forgetting about the weight of the I-love-you that’s been pushing every other thought out of her mind. “Movie soundtracks? Disney songs? They totally shouldn’t be there, especially the Disney songs. In fact, I’m not absolutely sure Disney songs should be anywhere.”

“Yeah, right—if you had any idea how much the rights for those Disney songs are costing us, you’d never say that. Besides, they’re not all terrible. You don’t like anything from _Beauty and the Beast_?Nothing from _Aladdin_?” Donna looks as though she knows what Cam’s answer is going to be before she hears it.

Cam just shrugs. “Not my thing; they’re a little too corny and manipulative. But there’s a lot of stuff on MusicLand that isn’t my thing. So yeah, I guess they have to be somewhere, but we should create some sort of Hollywood page for the soundtracks, and the Disney songs can live there too.”

They talk for awhile about the timeframe for a new Hollywood page: how many coding hours it would take, whether it might be finally time to hire some full-time coders (Cam has always been reluctant to give up any of the MusicLand coding work at all, but even she can see that it’s getting to be too much for one person and a few part-time consultants) Soon enough, that conversation trails off, and they find themselves walking in silence together again, just looking at the canopy of trees and listening to the outside sounds that they never seem to hear when they’re at Donna’s or at Symphonic Ventures: birds chirping, wildlife scuttling, the crunch of pine needles beneath their feet. After awhile, Donna starts humming.

Cam has learned something over the past year that she never really noticed at Mutiny: Donna is a hummer. Sometimes Cameron is annoyed by it, mostly when she’s wrestling with a particularly tricky block of code, but more often she actually likes it. Donna’s humming repertoire is eclectic and vast: classical (Baroque, mostly) when she’s cleaning; indie rock when she’s paying bills; folk when she’s cooking; country when she’s in a goofy mood. But this particular tune is none of those. After a few notes, Cameron recognizes it as ["A Whole New World,](http://www.heatherweb.com/stuff/fade/new-world.mp3) from _Aladdin_. And for some reason, the sound of it makes Cam stop in her tracks, almost as transfixed as she had been when hearing “Fade Into You” started her down this romantic path in the first place. Donna, who doesn’t notice that Cam is no longer beside her, continues walking and humming.

 _I can show you the world_  
_Shining, shimmering splendid._  
_Tell me, princess, now when did  
_ _You last let your heart decide?_

 _I can open your eyes_  
_Take you wonder by wonder_  
_Over sideways and under  
_ _On a magic carpet ride_

And suddenly, before she even realizes what she’s about to do, or how she’s about to do it, Cameron is running to catch up to Donna, is touching her shoulder, then her cheek. As Donna whips around in confusion, Cameron is kissing her, kissing her as if she’s never kissed anyone before.

 _A whole new world_  
_A new fantastic point of view_  
_No one to tell us no_  
_Or where to go  
_ _Or say we're only dreaming_

 _A whole new world_  
_A dazzling place I never knew_  
_But when I'm way up here_  
_It's crystal clear  
_ _That now I'm in a whole new world with you._

(Cameron would always find it absurdly, humiliatingly ridiculous that it was a Disney song, of all things, that was the catalyst for this leap of faith. “It’s not even really a love song,” she’d complain to Donna. And Donna would patiently answer every single time that it _is_ a love song, it’s actually an epic love song, even if it’s not a typical one. Cameron would be forever grateful that Donna, who manages to find endless things to tease her about, never, ever teases her about this.)

After a beat, through her haze, Cameron realizes that Donna is kissing her back, and the oncoming rush of colors and images and emotions of this particular magic carpet ride is overwhelming.

 _Unbelievable sights_  
_Indescribable feeling_  
_Soaring, tumbling, freewheeling  
_ _Through an endless diamond sky._

_A whole new world (Don't you dare close your eyes)_

(Donna is pulling back now, is touching Cameron’s cheek with shaking fingers.)

 _A hundred thousand things to see (Hold your breath, it gets better)_  
_I'm like a shooting star_  
_I've come so far  
_ _I can't go back to where I used to be._

(And Cameron is grasping Donna’s hand and holding it tight, her own hand trembling too as she does so.)

 _A whole new world (Every turn a surprise)_  
_With new horizons to pursue (Every moment, red-letter)_  
_I'll chase them anywhere_  
_There's time to spare  
_ _Let me share this whole new world with you._

They stare at each other, Donna’s expression simultaneously shocked but not surprised, Cameron’s eyes wide and luminous. It was done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, this one is officially the corniest I'm ever going to get in this fic. I'm really glad that there's a firm Chinese Wall between fic writers and the actual content creators of canon, because I'm sure if Chris Cantwell (for whom I have oodles of respect) saw this, his head would explode at what I'm doing to his characters. But what can I say? I actually do love "A Whole New World," and I always have. Also, there will be darks chapters ahead in this fic, and you might want a nice Disney escape from all that when they show up. And even if you don't, I do! :-)
> 
> The phrase "shocked but not surprised" was stolen from [this great review](https://www.avclub.com/a-lovely-restrained-halt-and-catch-fire-lets-everyone-1819254324) of Halt 4.08; it was used to describe Cam's reaction to Donna's finishing Pilgrim, and I admired it enough to snatch it for my own purposes. One of the many things that I love about Halt is how it inspired TV critics to write some really brilliant pieces. I particularly recommend Matt Brennan of Paste Magazine (@thefilmgoer on Twitter) if you want to read some great writing about the show.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna reacts.

Turning, Donna sees a look in Cameron’s eyes that manages to be both shockingly alien and something that she’s somehow known all her life. Before Donna can even begin to process what that could possibly mean, Cameron is kissing her, and every single wrong thing in the world is suddenly perfect and right and good. Without thinking about anything at all, Donna finds herself kissing Cameron back, as if kissing her were the most natural thing of all in this perfect and right and good new world. Then—just how much later Donna can’t really say—she pulls away and stares at Cam.

Neither of them makes a sound for what might be a full minute. Cameron is the first to remember how words are formed. “So. That happened.”

Donna is startled to hear herself laugh, and after a beat or two Cameron joins her. “Cameron . . . “ Donna says, as soon as she can manage to speak.

Cameron still has that same unfathomable expression. “I know. This isn’t how . . . I meant to . . . talk about it first. But it didn’t come out that way.”

Donna’s breath catches as she realizes that Cameron must have put some modicum of thought and planning into this apparently impulsive action, which somehow makes it all the more terrifyingly meaningful. “So let’s . . . talk about it now.”

Cameron nods, as if Donna were suggesting a business meeting about a routine MusicLand production issue. “Yeah. I think we need to do that.”

They walk back together in silence, both somehow understanding that this discussion can’t be done on foot; they need to be sitting down for it, because it’s probably going to be a long, long time before either one of them gets up again.

 

**§§§**

Donna, for her part, is barely aware of anything on this trip back to the Airstream; every bit of her emotional energy is reliving the kiss, and all of her mental faculties are focused on what on earth she and Cameron are going to say to each other about it. In addition, Cameron’s odd behavior over the past week is suddenly thrown into an entirely different light. It isn’t that Cam is getting bored with Phoenix, and it isn’t that she might be thinking about getting back together with Joe. It was always about her, about Donna, and the very thought of that is an electrical jolt to her entire being.

When she and Cameron find themselves back at the Airstream lawn chairs, Donna looks at them vaguely, wondering how it was that they could be exactly the same chairs that they’d sat in that morning, and how the same sun could be shining on them. Why isn’t the whole world as different as it should be?

Cameron rummages in the ice chest and pulls out a couple of beers. She uses the bottle opener on the little table between the lawn chairs to pop the tops, and then she silently hands a bottle to Donna, who takes it gratefully. In general, she considers herself well beyond the need to seek strength in drink, but this particular circumstance is far from ordinary.

Cameron is the first to break the silence that has lasted since they started walking back through the woods to the Airstream. “Is this just me?”

Donna looks at her. It’s the most basic question of all, and she’s not remotely surprised that it’s the first thing that Cameron wants to know.Donna doesn’t, however, have to think for an instant about her answer. “No. It isn’t.”

Cameron looks so openly relieved—so fragile, so damn vulnerable—that Donna actually feels tears coming into her own eyes. She turns away to try to force them to stop, but she sees Cam noticing anyway. “Donna . . .”

The tears are coming faster rather than ceasing, and Donna sees Cameron looking at her a little helplessly. “I’m sorry,” Donna says, trying and failing to regain some level of control. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

Before she can finish the sentence, Cameron is up and moving toward her, and then Donna feels herself being pulled into a hug. (She and Cam might have become almost impossibly close over the past year, but Cameron still practically never initiates hugs, and Donna is almost more startled by this one than she was by the kiss.) She lets herself melt against Cameron long enough for her heart rate to slow and her tears to subside. When she’s relatively centered again, she pulls out of the embrace reluctantly, taking Cam’s hand to hold onto a piece of her as she does so.

Donna feels Cameron squeezing it, giving her the courage to move further into this conversation. “How long have you . . . wanted to do this?” Donna is aware of how ridiculous a question this probably is, and how typical it is of her rational, orderly mind to busy itself with dates and chronologies instead of with the emotional beats that are so very much more complicated.

“Almosta week. I mean, obviously it must have started a lot earlier than that, but I didn’t really _know_ it before about a week ago. And then, well, it’s been pretty much all I can think about.” Cameron is running her fingers through her hair, but she’s also meeting Donna’s eyes directly as she says all this. It’s as if, Donna thinks, Cameron never wants to look away from her again. Nobody has looked at her that way for many years, not since Gordon way before the divorce, maybe even before Joanie and Haley were born.

“Ah. So, the Broadway page?” Donna realizes that Cameron had every reason to be distracted this past week. In fact, she’s amazed that Cam could code anything at all. She certainly wouldn’t have been able to do any sort of work if she had been the one contemplating confessing feelings to Cameron.

“Yeah,” Cameron looks apologetic. “I haven’t been at my most productive this week, that’s for sure. I’m hoping next week is going to be better. But whatever happens, that page is getting finished by end of day Tuesday.”

Donna can honestly say that the scheduling workflow of MusicLand’s web site right now is the very farthest thing from her mind.“Cam . . . what do you want, exactly? Do you know?”

Cam doesn’t hesitate at all. “Us. I want us.” She’s still looking right at Donna, almost challenging her.

“We already have us.” Donna hesitates, then verbalizes her deepest fear. “I’m so happy now. I’ve been so happy since we started Phoenix, after being unhappy for so long. This new version of ‘us’—it would be different. It would change everything.”

Cam’s focus on her is so direct that it’s almost unsettling. “Donna, the thing is . . . what we have now isn’t really sustainable.”

 _Mutiny, as it exists, isn’t sustainable._ Donna can’t believe that, in the middle of all of this, her mind flashes back to that terrible board meeting in which whatever “us” she and Cameron were then was severed, seemingly irrevocably and forever. She shakes off that memory and forces herself back to the present. “Why? Why isn’t it?” Donna’s voice comes out as a whisper.

“It isn’t because it isn’t. I’ve been happy, too; I’ve been _really_ happy. But do you honestly think we can just exist in this bubble forever, as best friends and business partners who happen to live together and who don’t date anyone or have sex with anyone? Do you really think that could actually work?” Cam sounds calm and matter-of-fact, as if what’s she’s saying is self-explanatory and no big deal at all. Donna, however, finds herself tearing up again. This thing that Cameron is able to talk about so easily is exactly what she’s been trying so hard not to think about for the past six months. When she told Katie that she didn’t want anything between herself and Cameron to change, she had meant it more than she’d ever meant anything in her life.

As Donna wipes the tears from her eyes and wills herself to prevent new ones from falling, she feels Cameron’s hand in hers again. She squeezes back for a moment before saying anything. “I don’t know. I wish it could work. It’s been better than just about anything else.”

Cameron touches Donna’s cheek. “But what if it were even more? What if it were, you know, everything? Wouldn’t that be . . . awesome?”

 _It would be_ , Donna thinks, _but it’s also much more likely to be a disaster._ “But what if it isn’t awesome? What if one of the thousand and one reasons why it’s probably an insane idea kills it? What if we ruin Phoenix? What if . . . what if we wreck our friendship again?” Donna pauses, finding the very thought of this intolerable. She’s only had Cam back for a year and a half after having lost her for eight long, lonely years. She can’t think about how it would feel to lose her again, not when they’ve come to mean so much more to each other this second time around.

“But what if we don’t? What if we can actually have a future so great that it makes what we are now look like nothing?” Cam is looking at her so earnestly, with so much tenderness, that Donna feels as though she genuinely won’t be able to bear it.

Donna tries for a joke to break some of the intensity. “I thought you said that the future was just another crappy version of the present.”

Not laughing this time, Cam looks at her a little pensively. “Maybe Joe was right. Maybe some futures can be different.”

Donna closes her eyes for a moment, thinking about that. “It’s just . . . so much risk. Cam, I don’t know if I’m . . . if I’m up to that, not after everything. I just don’t know if I can do it.”

Cam takes her hand again. “Look, I get it; it’s ok. We’ll always still have the us we are now, however it goes. I promise.”

 _But what if you’re wrong? How can you promise something like that? Just the kiss and the ask makes everything different. It’s like that observer effect in physics: noticing something changes it forever._ Donna manages to hold in her tears this time and even inwardly roll her eyes at her own ridiculous geekery.

“I need time to think. I might need a lot of time; I’m not sure how much. Is that ok? Can we still be us while I do that?” Donna hears her voice sounding pleading, sounding almost desperate, but she can’t do anything about it. This cliff might be too high for her to jump from, the water she’s aiming for too small, the surrounding rocks too jagged, especially now that she knows just how hurt it’s possible to be.

“Yeah. Of course it’s ok, and of course we can. Who else would we be?” Cam is looking at Donna with a softer, fonder look than Donna has ever seen from her before.

Donna smiles back at Cameron, then without thinking about it kisses her gently on the forehead. “Thank you.”

“For what? For ambushing you out of nowhere in the woods?” Cam’s grin makes her look a little more like herself.

“For being brave. For seeing possibilities that most people could never see.” _You don’t know how amazing you are, Cameron Howe_ , Donna thinks to herself.

Cam snorts a little. “This wasn’t brave. This was . . . there just weren’t any other options. It’s not like I had any real choice about anything. It just _is_.”

 _That’s what brave people must always feel,_ Donna thinks. _It’s probably only the cowards that realize how many possible bends in the road that there always actually are._

 

  **§§§**

They don’t say much after that, just sit and drink and watch the day fade into a beautiful sunset, and then into darkness.

Donna looks at Cameron, whose face is clearly illuminated in the moonlight. “Want me to get the fire going?”

Cam hesitates, swallowing a yawn. “I know that it’s crazy early, but I’m just totally wiped. I really just want to get some sleep.”

Donna nods. “Sure. Me, too.” It’s not true, of course; Donna can’t imagine how she’ll manage to quiet the sounds in her head enough to sleep tonight at all. But she understands completely why Cameron must be exhausted.

The table at the opposite end of the Airstream from Cam’s bed hasn’t been a table for most of the year; it’s been turned into a semi-permanent second bed, and it’s where Donna sleeps whenever their Saturday retreats stretch into Sunday mornings.It’s pretty comfortable, and it’s part of the rhythm of routine that she and Cameron have developed together.

Tonight, though, after the lights are out, Donna hears Cam’s voice, so quiet that it seems as though she might actually be talking to herself rather than to Donna. “You can come over here, if you want to, I mean, just to sleep.”

Donna’s heart lurches a little. “Cam . . .” She’s glad that she and Cameron can’t see each other right now, because she can’t imagine what emotions her face might be betraying.

“It’s not as though we haven’t fallen asleep together before,” Cam says.

It’s true, of course. Donna thinks about the many times that they’ve done exactly that, starting with that day before Christmas Eve in this Airstream, and all of the times on the couch when neither of them can quite drag themselves away from their late-night Nick at Nite sessions. But now, of course, everything is different, and Cameron pretending that it isn’t doesn’t make that difference go away.

Cameron, as if reading her thoughts, says, “We said we’d have the same us while you . . . while you figure things out. It’s only going to be different if we let it be different.”

Donna sighs. It’s not going to be as easy as that, whatever Cam is saying, whatever she might be thinking. But on the other hand, ever fiber of Donna’s being right now wants to be lying next to Cameron, not across the Airstream from her. Donna suddenly remembers telling Diane that she was going to try to follow her instincts more. Her instincts are saying that, whatever she ends up deciding about . . . whatever it might be, she wants to fall asleep next to Cam tonight.

Donna gets out of her bed, walks across the Airstream, and slides into bed beside Cameron. Cam lets out a breath but doesn’t say anything, and Donna lets her head rest in the crook of Cameron’s shoulder. They stay like that, each silently feeling the closeness of the other in the narrow Airstream bed.

Soon Donna can tell from the deep, even breathing beside her that Cameron has fallen asleep. She touches Cam’s cheek, thinking about how many times she’s done exactly that over the past year, in a darkened room, when Cam is asleep and unaware, when a gesture of intimacy like that feels unaccustomedly safe. What would be it be like, she wonders, to be able to do that whenever she wanted, in daylight hours, maybe even in front of other people? It’s an unthinkable thought, but yet it’s also the thought that’s going to occupy her mind and heart for the foreseeable future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of my personal favorite chapters--I just love Donna's intense feelings and her deep fear of loss. I hope you guys enjoy it, too!


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron waits.

Cameron has never really bought into the idea of the five stages of grief. When her father died, she was angry and miserable for what seemed like forever: there never was any denial or bargaining, and certainly nothing that could ever be properly called acceptance. It was pretty much the same thing all over again when Gordon died. But weirdly, there do seem to be five specific stages to the endless agony of Waiting for Donna to Decide.

 

**§§§**

**stage one: euphoria**

Incredibly, Cam not only _told_ Donna, she actually _kissed_ her, and the world didn’t stop turning on its axis. Amazingly, Donna didn’t say no. In fact, she said she needed to think about it, which has to be closer to yes than it is to no. Cameron feels like flying.

That sense of soaring joy lasts all week, fueling her MusicLand work and turning her coding into a white-hot blast of productivity. When the Broadway musical page is finished late Tuesday night, she knows that it’s the best page she’s ever done. She can’t stop looking at it, marveling at the perfect way that everything in it fits together, the marquees blinking enticingly, the virtual city street full of romance and promise. It’s an omen of the future; it has to be.

Cameron feels Donna coming up beside her before she looks up from her monitor and sees her there.

“It’s beautiful, Cam.” Donna smiles at Cameron a little too warmly, and her words feel heavy with significance. Everything about Donna seems _more_ right now.

“Thanks,” Cam says, beaming back at her. “I’m pretty stoked about it. And it’s great to get it finished, finally.”

“I’ve got the beta testers ready to go—they’ll be starting next week. With a little luck, we’ll be back on schedule after that.” Donna puts her hand on Cam’s shoulder and leaves it there. Cameron lets the warmth of Donna’s touch seep into her. She wishes they weren’t at Symphonic, wishes that she could take Donna’s hand and hold onto it forever.

“Good. What do you think should be next?” Cam wonders if that sentence is as laced with double meaning for Donna as it is for her.

“Well, maybe you should sketch out what you think that Hollywood page we talked about should look like. That probably needs to be the next part of the site that we focus on.” Donna is squinting at the computer monitor as she says this, so Cam can’t mull over whatever expression might be on her face.

“I can get that to you really soon, maybe tomorrow.” Cameron is eager to start tearing into her next project; it’s been awhile since she’s felt this focused and powerful.

Donna notices. “You’re really on a roll, this week.” This time she catches Cameron’s eye and holds it.

Cam shrugs. “Yeah, well, I’ve caught up on some sleep, which helps.” She doesn’t mention why she’s suddenly sleeping like a rock, and Donna doesn’t ask. They’re carefully not speaking to each other about the giant elephant in the room, but Cameron finds she happy enough not to care. Eventually Donna will decide, and in her current mood, Cam can’t imagine Donna _not_ choosing to give the two of them a try. It’s all going to be great.

 

**§§§**

**stage two: anxiety**

Unless, of course, it isn’t. Before the weekend is finished, the feeling of invincibility begins to fade, and suddenly, maddeningly, the sleeplessness returns.Will Donna _really_ decide to do this? And if she does, _when_ will she? Cameron now feels the full force of the agony of Donna’s indecision, and she wonders how long she’ll be able to stand it without going crazy. She imagines how wonderful being put into a medically-induced coma would be; they could wake her up when Donna makes up her mind. If only she had a doctor friend who would be willing to do it . . .

It’s obvious to Cameron that Donna notices the shift in Cam’s mood immediately; her morning “hey” is worried and solicitous.

Cam sighs, wondering whether they’re supposed to continue ignoring the growing tension, or if it would be better to acknowledge it. While she’s pondering that, Donna comes up to her and touches her hand. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard, and it probably isn’t fair.”

Cam looks at her, not knowing quite how to respond to this, either. “It’s ok. It’s just . . . I don’t know what it is, actually. I mean, it’s not a situation I’ve ever been in before.”

Donna laughs at that, a little hollowly. “Yeah. Me, either.”

“I’ve just never been great at waiting.” At Donna’s warm look, Cam blurts out what she’s been worrying about all morning. “But you’re still thinking about it, right?” Cameron hates how that sounds, as if she’s whining and complaining, but it comes out of her mouth anyway.

Donna stares at her. “Cam, I’m not thinking about anything else. It’s a miracle that I’m functioning at all.”

Relief washes over Cameron; she knows that it’s not likely that Donna would have completely forgotten about last week at the Airstream, but she’s not at her most rational and logical at the moment. “Ok. Yeah, me too.”

They regard each other. _When, when, when? When do you think you’re going to know what you want to do?_ Those sentences are reverberating so loudly in Cameron’s brain that she’s sure that Donna must hear them, too. When Donna looks at her sympathetically, Cam is certain of it.

“Cam, I just . . .” Donna doesn’t finish the sentence.

Cam gets it. She also knows that, hard as this waiting is for her, the whole thing is probably just as difficult, maybe _more_ difficult, for Donna. “It’s ok. I know. I can wait.” Whether she can or she can’t, there’s no option other than to try.

“Should we . . . go to the Airstream today?” Donna asks it hesitantly, and Cameron feels just as conflicted as Donna looks.

“I don’t think so,” Cam says slowly. “I think maybe we should just not go there until . . . until it’s done, one way or the other. I think that would just be easier.” She sees a flicker of sadness in Donna’s eyes, and Cameron knows that Donna must be thinking that their _us_ isn’t as easy to hold onto during this interim period as Cameron had promised. But being alone at the Airstream, where the whole thing had happened just last week, seems next to impossible.

“Yeah. I guess—yeah,” says Donna. Cameron wishes she could throw her arms around Donna and just hold her, and she wonders if Donna wishes that, too. “Maybe next week it’ll be . . .”

God, Cameron hopes so. _Maybe next week._

 

**§§§**

**stage three: avoidance**

But the next week passes quietly, with no major conversations and nothing to turn the following Saturday into an Airstream day. When Cameron wakes that morning, she feels a powerful desire to get out of the house, so she wouldn’t have to spend a day watching Donna watching her.

Gulping down a glass of orange juice, Cam glances quickly at Donna, who also seems to be subdued. “So . . . I was thinking maybe I’d go visit Bos today. I haven’t seen him in awhile.”

“That sounds good,” says Donna quickly, so quickly that Cam wonders if she also needs a little break from the two of them feeling their way around what they can talk about and what they shouldn’t. Shrugging inwardly, she adds that thought to the growing list of things that she doesn’t really want to think about.

Bos is working in his garage when Cameron arrives at his house. He smiles broadly when he sees her, dropping his paint brush and stepping away from the small bookcase he appears to be varnishing.

Cam indicates the bookcase with her chin. “So you’re in the furniture refinishing business now?”

Bos laughs. “Got it for next to nothing at a garage sale. It’s a mess, and I’m taking it on as a personal challenge to get it ship-shape.”

“And then what are you going to do with it?” This whole exchange makes Cam realize just how much she’s missed Bos over the past several months. She’s not sure why they’ve gotten a little out of touch, but it’s time to fix that.

“Fill it with books, I guess. And after that, take up reading. Better late in life than never.” Cameron sees Bos looking at her thoughtfully, as if he realizes that there are big things going on in her life right now.

Cam knows that she can’t tell him any of that, of course; just the idea of Cameron and Donna as a couple would probably shock the hell out of Bos. But even an oblique conversation with someone who isn’t Donna, who knows Cam and loves her, would be a relief.

“I’ll give you some Stephen King to get you started; you might like him,” says Cameron.

Bos snorts at that, and Cam grins. Maybe not.

Bos clears his throat. “Haven’t seen you around much lately.”

Cam shrugs, feeling bad about that. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I’ve been really busy with MusicLand.” She thinks to herself that she’s been so absorbed in her new life with Donna that it hasn’t seemed as though there were room for anything else, even Bos.

“Figured that was it. You have a lull now?” Cam sees that Bos knows perfectly well that the “really busy” excuse is some sort of bullshit, but he’s not going to pursue it if Cam doesn’t want him to.

As always, Bos always seems to know exactly what Cameron needs him to be. “Yeah, sort of. I mean, I just finished a big, complicated web page, and I haven’t started coding the next one yet.”

“MusicLand is looking sharp. My son is one of your subscribers. Did you know that?”

Cam shakes her head. “Nope, but that’s great to hear. I hope he likes it.”

“He does.” They both drift into silence for a couple of moments, and then Bos speaks again. “So, what’s up Cam? You look as though you have something on your mind.”

Cameron sighs. “I do, but . . . I can’t really tell you what it is.”

Bos studies her. “Good thing or bad thing?”

“Well, let’s just say it has the potential to be either, and I’m waiting to see which one it’s going to be.” That’s just about as honest and true as she can possibly manage, Cam thinks.

“Huh. Well, something like that is hard. Anything you can do to nudge it one way or another?” Bos is smiling at her, and just the sight of it makes a little of Cam’s anxiety dissolve.

She shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so. I gave it my best shot and now . . . it’s sort of out of my hands.”

“Well, that’s rough, but at least whatever happens, you won’t need to blame yourself. You’ve done what you can, and you should be able to feel good about that.” Bos picks up his paintbrush and dips it into the varnish can. “Like this old thing. I don’t know if it’s going to be a masterpiece or just barely better than garage sale quality, but I’ve given it my all, and that’s good enough for me.”

Cam thinks about that: an old bookcase is one thing, and a possible lifelong partnership is totally another. But still, Bos has a point: she’s opened up her heart to Donna, and she has no power over what Donna ends up doing with that—it’s not up to Cameron. All she can do is to wait and to hope. She gives Bos a grateful look but doesn’t say anything, because her throat is suddenly too tight for speech.

If Bos notices, he doesn’t comment. “What to come inside? We don’t have any orange soda, but I’m sure we can find something worth drinking. There’s also some chocolate cake left over from last night. Sound good?”

Cameron nods, thinking about how lucky she is to have Bos, and how she has to do better about keeping in touch with him. “That sounds great.”

 

**§§§**

**stage four: reflection**

Talking with Bos seems to have the effect of helping Cam feel a little more philosophical about the whole situation. She can’t control anything, so she might as well surrender and just wait and see what happens. And after all, it wouldn’t be so terrible if Donna decides that she doesn’t want to go for it, would it? They’ll still have each other as friends, and that’s pretty much been better than any other relationship Cameron has ever had. For the first time all year, Cam finds herself taking a lot of baths, which she finds relaxing, almost meditative. It’s a better way to pass the time than most, and Cameron hopes that this unusually clear-eyed calm is something that lasts until Donna make up her mind.

One evening when Cam is lying on her bed thinking about everything and nothing at all, Haley pokes her head into Cam’s room. “Hey, Cam. Can I come in?”

“Sure.” Cameron realizes that she really hasn’t seen much of Haley during the last few weeks. Haley, she guesses, is so busy with her own relationship that she probably hasn’t paid any attention to the weirdness between Donna and Cameron. “What’s up?”

“I kind of wanted to ask your advice.” Haley is fidgeting a little, as if whatever she’s about to ask is making her uncomfortable.

“Ask away,” says Cam, glad of any mental distraction. “Not that I’m great in the advice department, so consider that your fair warning.”

Haley smiles a little absently, her mind clearly on whatever she’s about to say. “So, it’s about Jordan. I mean, not exactly _about_ her, but . . .” Cameron notices that Haley’s face is reddening a little.

Cam waits a few moments before saying anything. “It’s ok. Anything you’re thinking about is totally ok. I mean, unless you’re thinking of murdering Jordan and her family, and then it really isn’t.”

Haley stares at her and then laughs, and Cameron is pleased that her bad joke seems to have made things less awkward. “No, nothing like that. It’s . . . well, I was just wondering . . . how old were you when you first had sex?” Haley asks this question all in a rush, eyes fixed on the books on Cam’s desk rather than on Cameron herself.

Cam is startled; this conversation isn’t anything that she feels particularly equipped to handle. “You and Jordan haven’t . . .”

“No, definitely not. I mean, we’ve only been going out for like, a month. I’m totally not ready for that. But . . .”

Cameron feels relieved, now that she realizes that this is just a theoretical conversation. “But you’re thinking about it.”

Haley nods. “Yeah, I just sort of . . . don’t want to be unprepared, you know?”

Cam smiles to herself, thinking about how much this sounds like something Donna would have done. She’s always thought of Haley as more like Gordon than like Donna, but she also seems to have inherited Donna’s planning gene. (It strikes Cameron that seeing someone you love in your children might actually be one of the good parts of having kids; she’d never thought about it quite like that before.)

When Cameron sees that Haley is eyeing her a little curiously, she realizes that she probably should have said something a few beats before now. “That’s smart. It’s a lot smarter than I was, actually.”

Haley hesitates for a moment. “What happened with you? Was it . . . bad?”

Cameron sighs. “It just wasn’t anything. I was too young, and I just sort of leaped into it, without thinking much about whether I wanted to do it, or what the consequences would be. It’s true what they tell you—sex changes everything in a relationship, and you have to be really, really sure that you love the person enough to risk that.”

Haley sighs a little. “Yeah. Don’t worry—I’m not going to be doing it anytime I soon. I just wanted to start thinking about it. Can you . . . maybe not tell my mom about this?”

Cameron nods, glad that there really isn’t anything not to tell Donna, other than the fact that her daughter seems to be thoughtful and responsible. “You can talk to me about this stuff, whenever you want. I don’t promise to have anything great to say, but I’ll try.”

Haley gives her a warm look, with eyes that remind her again of Donna. “Thanks. Joanie said . . . she said that I should talk to you, and she was right.”

Cameron’s throat tightens at Haley’s words. _God, I really love these kids, this family, s_ he thinks. _I always have._ Of all the weird, unexpected things that have happened to her as a result of knowing Donna, this one might be the most unexpected of all.

As Haley says good night, Cameron thinks about what she has just said to her: sex _does_ change everything. For the first time, her confidence about starting a real relationship with Donna falters just a little.What if it doesn’t work? Why, after all, was she so confident that it would? She loves Donna; she knows that, absolutely and completely. But she’s never had sex with a woman before. Was it naive to assume that, if you love a person enough, the sex would work itself out? Cameron shakes those thoughts out of her head. First, Donna has to decide that she even wants to do this. If she does, it will be time enough to worry about the details.

 

**§§§**

**stage five: regret**

Yet those worrying details continue to invade Cameron’s mental space, growing louder and more insistent with every passing day. The Monday before Thanksgiving, Cam wakes up to a heaviness that makes it difficult for her to drag herself out of bed. It’s been a little more than three weeks, and Donna doesn’t seem any closer to saying anything about anything. This whole thing might have been a terrible mistake. Whatever she’d promised Donna, their _us_ seems completely out of whack. They haven’t hung out watching television, or gone to the Airstream, or talked much about anything beyond the bare bones necessary to keep Phoenix afloat. At this point, Cameron almost wishes that Donna would just deliver what’s probably the inevitable rejection, so they can get back to normal. Cameron forces herself not to think about the biggest question that has started to haunt her: what if they never _can_ get back to normal?  
****

Cameron microwaves herself a mug of cheese egg (her go-to comfort food) for breakfast. She’s eating it when Donna comes into the kitchen, already dressed for the office.

“Morning,” says Donna, in the hesitant tone that has become lately familiar to Cameron. Cam can barely muster a smile back at her. Donna catches Cam’s eye, looking just about as unhappy as Cameron feels right now.

 _This has to end,_ Cam thinks. _I really wish I could just undo all this. It’s not working. It’s never going to work._ She’s on the brink of saying exactly that to Donna, in fact, when she realizes that Donna has just said something to her.“Huh?”

Seeing Donna rubbing her temple, Cameron notes just how wrung out Donna is looking this morning. These three weeks have been hard on both of them. “I said, Katie’s in town for the week. We have a lunch scheduled today, and I figured I might as well take that alone again. That way you could do . . other things.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Cam, thinking that Donna is probably looking for excuses not to spend time with her. And really, who can blame her? Cameron saddled her with this I-love-you nuclear reactor that Donna wasn’t looking for and probably doesn’t want. All she’s done is plunge the two of them into something that they’ll need to claw their way out of, without gaining anything from it. She was crazy ever to imagine that it could be otherwise.

“Do you think . . . it would be ok if I asked her to come to Thanksgiving dinner? I mean, I don’t think she has anywhere to go, and she’s in town mostly for us.” Donna’s tentative voice is back.

Cameron sighs, thinking about how, on top of everything else, the stupid holidays are coming. Donna had mentioned that Joanie was staying in New York, since she’ll be home for Christmas, but that she’d invited Bos and Diane, and Tanya, who doesn’t have any other plans thisyear.Cam shrugs. “Sure, whatever.” When she sees that her lack of enthusiasm causes Donna to give her an anxious look, she tries to smile. “Really, that sounds good. It’ll be fun.” It wouldn’t be fun, of course, but Cam will do her best to make it seem as though it were.

“I think so, too. I hope Katie wants to do it.” Donna looks as though she means that, and Cameron reflects for a moment on the fact that Donna and Katie really do seem to have hit it off.

“Hey, can you invite Trip, too? I know he said that he wasn’t going anywhere for Thanksgiving.” Cam enjoys hanging out with Trip, and she figures that Tanya might like him there, too.

Donna rolls her eyes in a very normal _Donna_ sort of way, forgetting for a moment that things are far from normal right now. “Trip? Really?” At Cam’s shrug, Donna sighs. “Ok, sure. I’ll ask him today.”

After Donna leaves for the office, Cameron spends the day trying (and mostly failing) to work on the bug reports from the beta testers, attempting to fix up the Broadway musicals page so it would be ready for its expected late December launch date. She’s grateful to have the day to herself, glad that Donna’s lunch with Katie means that Cam doesn’t have to go into Symphonic and worry about getting through a mid-day Phoenix meeting when all she feels like doing now is crawling into a hole and wallowing.

When Donna comes home that evening, Cam is even more depressed than she had been that morning.She’s glad that Haley is having dinner at Jordan’s that night, because she’s sure that her mood would be obvious to anyone. It’s clear that Donna can tell exactly how Cameron is feeling, and Cam can’t manage to do anything to hide it.

Cameron and Donna just look at each other. ( _These long, searching looks between the two of them are getting to be their trademark way of non-communication_ , Cam thinks, wistfully, bitterly.) “Cameron . . .” Donna says, looking as though she were about to cry.

Cam shrugs and looks away, about to say that everything is fine, waiting is fine, it’s all good, when she feels Donna’s arms around her. Donna just holds her without saying anything at all, and Cam slowly feels some of her misery leaving, some sense of peace and tranquility coming back. (Every single hug that Donna has ever given her, Cam realizes, has always made her feel better, safer, loved. Those hugs are magic.)

Finally, Cameron pulls away, taking Donna’s hand as she does so. Donna looks at their entwined hands, finally speaking. “I’m so sorry. I’m just . . . paralyzed, really. I can’t say no, and I can’t say yes. I’m making you miserable.”

Cam shakes her head. “It’s a huge thing. I don’t want you saying yes unless you’re really sure. And until you are, and even if you never are, I’m here.”

Cameron sees Donna tear up a little at her words and realizes that her “I’m here” is one of the phrases from their shared past that would be likely to hit Donna hard. She and Donna look at each other again, both thinking about their history and wondering about their future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies that not much happens in this chapter, but that's hard on Cameron too--waiting for the next act to begin is always the toughest part of any story!


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna ruminates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rewind, rewind . . .

**week one**

Returning home after The Kiss, Donna feels nothing but trepidation, but she notices right away that Cameron seems to be in the thrall of some sort of uncomplicated euphoria. Donna can’t decide whether that fact should make her feel more anxious or just a little bit happier herself. Whatever the case, she can’t help smiling on Monday morning when she catches Cameron beaming at her. “You’re in a good mood.”

Cameron, if possible, glows even more. “I am.” She doesn’t say anything else, and she doesn’t need to.

“That’s good,” says Donna, wondering if she’s going to be forced to say lame, meaningless things to Cameron for the rest of her life, or at least for the foreseeable future. “So . . . I’ll see you at noon.”

Cameron nods, biting into her piece of peanut-butter-spread toast, already scribbling on a notepad beside her. Apparently her inability of focus on MusicLand coding is over.

 

**§§§**

So she won’t be completely incapacitated, Donna forms a plan: she’s going to get up early, well before Cameron, and swim in the morning. That swimming will be her thinking-about-Cameron time, and she’s going to try as hard as she can to leave everything having to do with Cam in the pool each day.It might not work—it probably won’t, she admits to herself—but it’s the best thing she can come up with.

_The first and most basic question: does she love Cameron? Love her enough even to contemplate this . . . this disruption . . . at all? That one is surprisingly straightforward, Donna thinks, gliding along in a steady, powerful breast stroke: she does. She’s never articulated it as such to herself, not really, but she’s known it since—since when? Since this past summer? Since the crazy trip to Florida? Since Cameron asked about working together again? Since Gordon died? Since Pilgrim exploded on her computer screen? Since Cameron came to her hotel room door and told her that working together was the most fun that she’d ever had in her life? Since “If it weren’t for Gordon Clark, I would have never met you?” Since stealing the XTs? Since that road trip to COMDEX? Since the day she fixed Cameron’s code at Cardiff? It’s impossible to say, but the depth and complexity of it is undeniable. Donna pictures Cameron’s wide smiles (does anyone look as bright and happy as Cameron can when she smiles?), thinks about her single-minded focus when she’s hunched over her computer, sees the rare flickers of vulnerability that sometime flash across her face. The love part of all this is really the easy thing: she loves Cam, period, full stop._

_But it’s oddly backwards, Donna muses, to love someone before starting a relationship with them. Generally it’s the exact opposite: you meet a person, and if you like them you have a few casual dates that might or might not turn into something deeper. That’s how it worked with Gordon: they met, they dated, and then after enough time had passed they fell in love. That’s the normal course of events. But this? This thing with Cameron is altogether different, so upside down, so intense, so all-consuming that Donna honestly doesn’t know what to do with it. “Starting a relationship” seems like a meaningless phrase, since she and Cameron_ do _have a relationship; they already have one of the most important relationships that Donna has ever had in her life. But what if Cameron is right? What if it could be more? What if it_ could _be everything?_

 

**§§§**

**week two**

The phone rings late one night after Cameron has gone to bed, and when Donna picks up she hears Joanie’s voice on the line. She responds with reflexive concern. “Hey, there. Is everything all right?” Joanie doesn’t call all that often, and Donna’s first instinct is to worry when she does.

“It’s fine. I just kind of wanted to call. How are you doing?” Joanie’s voice is casual, but Donna wonders if there’s anything behind it. Has Haley noticed that Donna is preoccupied and mentioned something about it to Joanie?

“Good, pretty busy with work, between Symphonic and Phoenix.” That was true enough, thinks Donna: on top of everything with Cam, keeping up adequately with two demanding jobs has been the biggest professional challenge for Donna since those crazy early days of Mutiny.

“MusicLand looks great. Some of my friends are subscribers, and they can’t believe that it’s my mom’s company.” Joanie actually sounds proud, and Donna feels a shot of happiness at her words. Her relationship with Joanie has gotten steadily better all year, and Donna has been too focused on everything else in her life to savor that fact as fully as it deserves to be savored.

“It’s going really well. We’re working on a couple of new pages, and when they’re up we’ll release some new music, too. We need to keep building momentum. So make a lot of new friends, and then talk us up!” Donna wishes that Joanie would be able to come home for Thanksgiving, but she knows that waiting for a longer Christmas visit makes sense.

“I’ll get right on that.” Donna can see Joanie’s smirk as if the two of them were standing in the same room. “So how’s Cam? I haven’t heard from her in a couple of weeks.” Joanie’s casual tone becomes, if possible, even more casual.

“She’s fine,” says Donna, hoping that it would remain true. “She’s just been pretty busy, too. We really need to hire some coders to help her out.”

“You should, you know, make sure she gets out once in awhile. Do stuff with her. Sometimes she works too much.” Joanie’s voice is awkward, and Donna suddenly realizes that this call isn’t about her at all: Joanie is worried about Cameron, and she’s checking in with her to make sure that Cam is all right. Rather than making Donna feel overlooked or rejected, the thought warms her heart: few things touch her more than seeing proof of the deep relationships that Cameron has forged with her daughters.

“Good idea. I’ll make sure to do that this weekend.” The conversation drifts onto other things, but part of Donna’s mind, as has become typical, remains on Cameron throughout it.

 

**§§§**

_Dating Cameron—that sounds so ridiculous, Donna thinks, ticking off laps in the pool_ — _wouldn’t just affect her and Cam; it would also affect Joanie and Haley. It’s not that she worries that they wouldn’t approve, not exactly, anyway. And, of course, they’re both nearly adults, so it’s not the way it would have been if they were children. But still, what would they think? Would it complicate Haley’s ideas about her own sexuality? Would Joanie feel jealous, because in her mind, at least, Cameron has always been_ hers _? Would they be embarrassed? Would it make them want to avoid coming home, avoid seeing_ her _? What if they became as estranged as Cameron is with her own mother? The thought of that sends a chill through Donna; it’s yet another risk to add to the growing mountain of risks that have been steadily piling up inside Donna’s mind._

 

**§§§**

**week three**

Donna looks up at the light tap on her office door, sees Tanya standing there, and motions for her to come in.

“Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to let you know that we just scored big: we just got the rights for streaming all of the Beatles music.” Tanya is beaming; this is a real coup, and she knows it.

Donna is amazed. “I didn’t think that we had a chance to get that, even at the astronomical price we were offering. And they went with our exclusivity clause?”

Tanya nods, not doing any sort of job at masking her pride in how this negotiation went down. “It’ll be available on MusicLand alone for the next five years, with an option to renegotiate after that.”

“This is great. I’m sure there are plenty of users out there who will want to subscribe for the Beatles alone. Cam is going to go nuts when I tell her.” Donna pauses, thinking about the fact that she and Cam seem to be existing on parallel streams right now. One stream is the day-to-day Phoenix work;the rhythms of their house; the normalcy of a comforting routine that has developed over the past year. The other, of course, is the shadowy specter of the future; the sudden, powerful looks that they sometimes can’t help exchanging; the tense anticipation of what might be to come. Donna tries to shake off this second stream and focus solely on the fact that, right now, MusicLand is exceeding her most optimistic expectations.

“I can’t wait to see what kind of page she comes up with for the Beatles,” Tanya says. “I’ll bet it’s going to be incredible. She’s had amazing design ideas, hasn’t she?”

“She sure has,” Donna answers, thinking that some of the MusicLand graphics are so beautiful that she sometimes can’t believe that they actually exist. “I think she was talking about some sort of Woodstock page for the 1960s music if the Beatles came through, and that could be really awesome.”

After Tanya leaves, Donna sits back in her chair, wishing that it wouldn’t be another two hours before Cam would get here. She really can’t wait to see Cam’s face when she hears about this. Everything, she knows, feels bigger, better, more _real_ when she can talk about it with Cameron.

 

**§§§**

_There’s Phoenix to consider, of course, Donna thinks as she improvises a backstroke. They’ve worked so hard to get where they are, and everything is going so well right now. What if they both get trapped inside some sort of love fog and can’t get any work done at all? Donna doesn’t think that’s likely—they’re not teenagers, after all—but still, sometimes when she looks at Cameron right now every rational thought she has just flies out of her mind. Even worse, what would happen if they had some terrible breakup? Could they possibly still work together after that? Is it smart to risk their business on something like this? Working with Gordon at Mutiny probably made things worse between them; it certainly didn’t make anything better. Phoenix is everything right now, and she really should be doing everything that she can to keep it strong and thriving._

_But, Donna admits to herself as she finishes another lap, maybe Phoenix isn’t_ quite _everything. Cameron means more to her than Phoenix. Or rather, Cameron is so inextricably bound up with Phoenix that it’s impossible to picture one without the other. Donna chose Mutiny over Cameron in the past, but she has no doubt that if it came down to it now and she had to make a choice, she’d choose Cameron over Phoenix in a heartbeat. Everything is different now, and she’s different too._

 

**§§§**

“What are you thinking about having?” Donna was surprised but pleased when Diane asked her out to lunch. They haven’t been seeing that much of each other: with everything going on, Donna has been insanely busy. Diane, for her part, has been steadily cutting down her hours at Symphonic in order to spend more time with Bos.

“My usual chicken paillard. How about you?”

“My usual risotto.” They both smile, and Donna wonders if Diane is also thinking about the many conversations that they’ve had over the years in this same restaurant.

After they give the waiter their orders, Diane takes a sip of her wine and gives Donna a careful look. “So . . . how are things going with you?” It’s a simple question, and Donna wishes that she could give Diane a real answer.

“Things are . . . hectic,” says Donna, thinking that there’s nothing remotely untrue about this particular answer. “How is everything with you?”

“I’m trying to make things a little less hectic on my end, but it’s hard. John and I want to travel and spend more time with each other, and we’ve been doing some of that. But giving up more and more of the firm to do it . . . well, it’s been harder than I thought it would be.” Diane takes another sip of her wine, looking a little pensive.

Even though Donna is more than full of her own doubts and feelings at the moment, some of what Diane is implying penetrates. “I know what you mean. I sometimes think it’s too bad we can’t just split ourselves into multiple people. That way we could give a hundred percent to work, a hundred percent to parenting, and a hundred percent to being a spouse. Since we _can’t_ do that, figuring out the right proportions for everything is really hard.”

”It is, but I guess for me, in the end, I just want as much time with John as I can get. That doesn’t come without a price, but it’s a price I’m happy to pay.” Donna is relieved to see that Diane really appears to mean that.

Donna hesitates for a moment. “Diane . . . can I ask you something?”

Diane looks at her. “Of course.”

Donna takes a breath. “How long did it take you to know that you wanted it to be serious with Bos? I mean, you’d been married before. What made you sure you wanted to try it again?”

If Diane finds the question odd, she doesn’t say so. “I really never thought I’d want to be married again, after Ben. I didn’t think I even wanted the _messiness_ of loving someone again, even if I didn’t get married. But it’s not something you decide, really; it just happens, and you realize that you can’t imagine your life without the person in every aspect of it. And once you see that, well, it’s not really a choice anymore, is it? You’re already with that other person, whether you wanted to be or not, and you have to admit that and arrange your life to accommodate it.”

Donna nods, thinking that she absolutely can’t, at this point, imagine her life without Cameron in it. If that’s true, and if what Diane just said is right, why is she having so much trouble pulling this particular trigger?

Diane seems to notice Donna’s conflicted look. “Is there someone . . . in your life right now?”

Since Donna can’t really answer that, she avoids the question with another partial truth. “I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking, lately.” At that moment the waiter arrives with their meal, allowing talk to morph into less difficult subjects.

 

**§§§**

**week four**  
****

_By now, Donna’s morning swims have become more stressful than relaxing, and she finds that Cameron-thinking is gnawing at her all day long and well into the night, making it difficult for her to sleep or to concentrate on work. Why can’t she decide? She worries that perhaps the fact that she can’t means that, deep down, she doesn’t want to say yes, but she also can’t bear to make the decision to give up on the idea of being with Cameron, either. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt quite so trapped and helpless as she does right now. She had thought that she could simply make a list of everything that needed considering, think about each one in turn, and then arrive at a logical decision, one with which she could be comfortable no matter which one it turned out to be. But it seems as though the more she thinks, the farther away from anything resembling reason she actually gets._

 

**§§§**

Monday morning before Thanksgiving, Donna enters the kitchen and sees Cameron hunched over the table, spooning what Donna surmises to be Cheese Egg into her mouth from a mug. Donna can tell from her outline, from the methodical, unthinking way her spoon rises and falls, just how unhappy Cam is right now. The realization of that fills Donna with guilt.

Donna tries to start a normal, Phoenix-related conversation. “So . . . Katie’s in town for the week.”

Not appearing to hear her, Cameron doesn’t look up at first. Then suddenly realizing that Donna has said something, Cam cocks her head and responds with a “Huh?”

“I said, Katie’s in town for the week. We have a lunch scheduled today, and I figured I might as well take that alone again. That way you could do . . other things.”

Cameron shrugs and nods, if possible looking even more unhappy than she had before. Donna wishes more than anything that she could give Cam what she wants, that she could take all of that unhappiness from her and whisk it away like dandelion fluff, but she just can’t do that yet. What’s wrong with her, anyway?

 

**§§§**

That morning in the office, Donna sees Trip alone in his office, pecking away at his desktop computer. She sighs, remembering that she’d promised Cam that she’d ask him to Thanksgiving dinner.

Trip looks up at Donna’s light tap on his door. “This is unexpected. I don’t think that you’ve ever darkened my doorstep before.”

Donna ignores that. “So I was wondering . . . do you have any plans for Thanksgiving?”

Trip’s customarily smarmy expression is replaced for an instant with genuine surprise. “I’m working pretty hard on getting Ask Smithers ready for its IPO, so I didn’t want to go away for the weekend to see my mom and my brother and his family in Indiana. It’ll be me, a couple of turkey sandwiches, and a few hours of whatever movies I decide to rent.”

“If you like . . . you could have dinner with us. Tanya will be there, and Cameron of course, and Diane and Bos.” Donna wonders if she’s ever delivered a more awkward invitation.

An odd look that Donna can’t quite decipher flickers across Trip’s face, but it’s gone quickly. His smile, however, is peculiarly genuine. “I could do that, if it’s not a big deal for you.”

Donna smiles back, surprised that he actually seems to want to be included. “Not a big deal at all. See you around three.” Inviting Trip might not actually have been the worst idea that Cam has ever had, she thinks.

 

**§§§**

“So, you’re looking . . . what’s the word? . . . distracted?” Katie says this before Donna has finished sitting down at their restaurant table. Donna finds herself relieved at her directness, and surprised that Katie is able to read her so quickly, and apparently at a glance.

She responds with some directness of her own. “At least you didn’t say ‘terrible,’ which I think is probably just as accurate.”

Katie shakes her head, smiling a little. “No, sorry; I don’t think you could ever pull off ‘terrible.’ But what’s going on? Or don’t you want to talk about it?”

Donna hesitates, and suddenly her need to have a conversation with someone other than herself overpowers her customary desire for caution and privacy. “Well, a couple of weeks ago . . . Cameron kissed me.” She braces herself for Katie’s reaction.

To Donna’s surprise, that reaction appears to be one of unqualified delight. “I was wondering if that was something that was going to happen eventually. That’s great!” Katie suddenly seems to remember Donna’s conflicted, worn-out expression. “It’s not great?”

Donna sighs, wondering why she can’t seem to get back to the “It’s great!” feeling she had when she kissed Cameron back before her mind had a chance to catch up with what was going on. “I don’t know what it is.”

“Wait, you said this was a couple of weeks ago? What’s been going on with the two of you since?” Katie is leaning toward her as though this were the most interesting thing she’s heard in a long time.

“Well, I’ve sort of been . . . thinking. And trying to decide.” Donna realizes how anticlimactic this probably sounds. She’s sure that Katie would have—hell, _most_ people would have—known what they wanted to do without quite this much dithering.

Katie, however, is nodding. “Yeah, I get that. Of course you’d need to think about it. That’s perfectly normal.”

Even though _normal_ shouldn’t matter, Donna feels relieved at her words. “I just . . . I just wish I could make up my mind. I think I’m making Cam miserable. She probably wishes that she never kissed me in the first place.”

Katie gives her a half-grin. “I’m willing to bet, without even having all of the evidence in hand, that she doesn’t wish that at all. But what’s stopping you? I mean, where _are_ you in all this thinking?”

Donna takes a sip of her water and sighs. “I honestly don’t know. There are so many rational reasons _not_ to do this, but I still can’t tell her no. I think I’m just scared to say yes, and I can’t seem to get away from that.”

Katie looks at her. “Well, let’s try it from a different angle. Suppose Haley came to you and asked your advice about whether to try being with a girl that she really likes and who gives every indication of liking her back. What would you tell her?”

Donna starts to respond that it’s not a fair comparison, that her life is a lot more complicated than Haley’s life, that the risks she faced were much greater. But then she wonders if that’s just another form of bullshit, and she answers with the truth. “I’d tell her to go for it, that life is short and that love is something precious, and that if she doesn’t try she might regret it forever, however it ends up turning out, even if she winds up getting hurt.”

Katie smiles at her. “Exactly.”

 

**§§§**

Thanksgiving morning, Donna and Cameron are both in the kitchen, getting ready for the arrival of their guests. Donna can tell that a big holiday dinner is just about the last thing that Cameron feels like going through, and Donna can’t really blame her. Cam has been quiet and withdrawn all week, and Donna herself has been so busy shopping and planning for Thanksgiving that she has actually managed to push thoughts about Cameron aside for a few days and just concentrate on turkey brines and stuffing recipes.

 _I really do love her_ , Donna thinks as she watches Cameron gamely chop and mince. She’s thought that before, of course, thought it many times over the last several weeks; she’s really never doubted it, even when she’s been most unsure about what she wanted to do about that certainty. But now, for some reason, Donna feels the full weight of everything that she’s been struggling with evaporate into nothingness and drift away. ( _Totally like dandelion fluff,_ she thinks.) Looking at Cameron, Donna suddenly knows deep in her soul that Diane was right. It’s just not a choice anymore. It simply _is_.

Cameron looks up and catches Donna looking at her. “What?”

Donna doesn’t hesitate this time. “I want to try.”

Cam frowns. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with the way I’m cutting these turnips. They’re going to be mashed up anyway—you always think that everything has to be small and perfect, but it doesn’t. Just let me finish.”

Donna can’t help rolling her eyes. “Those are rutabagas, not turnips. And yeah, your chopping is fine. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Donna watches Cam suddenly get it. “You mean . . .”

Donna nods. “Us. You and me. I want to try it. If you still want to, that is.”

Cam grins the widest grin that Donna has ever seen on a human being before. “Oh, I think I still want to. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s try.”

They look at each other, Donna vaguely aware that she’s smiling almost as broadly as Cameron. “So . . . what now?”

“Can we cancel Thanksgiving, and spend all four days of the weekend in the Airstream?” Cam’s voice is hopeful.

Donna shakes her head. “Afraid not. But yeah, bad timing on my part.” She wonders exactly how she’s going to pull off the role of gracious hostess when, indeed, all she wants to do is go off alone with Cameron and not see anybody else for a good long while.

Cameron sighs. “I didn’t think so.”

Donna touches Cameron’s cheek. “We can do this, though.” Cameron turns to face her, and Donna leans forward. They kiss, and it feels exactly as it had the first time, perfect and right and good. Donna wonders why it has taken her more than three weeks to get here, and then she stops wondering about anything at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so, a new act officially begins!


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein thanks are given.

At exactly 3:00 pm on Thanksgiving afternoon, Tanya rings Donna’s doorbell. Donna answers after a moment or two, looking a little breathless. Tanya hopes that she’s not too early; she always forgets that some people expect guests to arrive comfortably after the time that they actually specify. As someone who is always, always prompt, Tanya finds that whole concept a little mystifying.

But Donna appears happy enough to see her; in fact, she’s smiling harder than Tanya has seen her smile for a few weeks, and it’s a smile that seems to be unusually genuine. “Hi, Tanya, come on in.”

Tanya enters the house a little cautiously. “Am I the first one here?”

Donna shrugs. “Not really. I mean, I’m here, and Haley is around somewhere. And there’s Cameron, of course.” The fact that Donna is flushing puzzles Tanya a little. But, she reasons, pulling together a Thanksgiving dinner for multiple guests would probably be enough to make anyone flush, even Donna.

When Tanya enters the living room, she finds a plate of cheese, crackers, dip, and crudités sitting on the coffee table. Cameron is there too, busily putting food on her own little plate. She looks up and grins at Tanya. “Hey. Happy Thanksgiving!”

Tanya has always assumed that Cameron is the sort of person who skulks her way through the holidays, keeping a low profile and waiting impatiently for them to be over and life to return to normal. But she must have been wrong, because Cameron looks more relaxed and cheerful than Tanya has ever seen her looking. “Hi, Cam. How’s it going?”

“I would say it’s going pretty well. How about you?” Cameron looks as though she’s just cracked the funniest joke in the world.

“Um . . . good. It’s good. It was nice of Donna to have us.” The smell of turkey in the air has a delicious normalcy about it, for which Tanya is relieved—at least there’s _something_ in this house right now that’s normal. She busies herself with creating a plate of crudités and dip to take with her to the couch. Tanya notices that Cameron is watching her do that with unfocused eyes, as though she’s really not seeing her at all. As soon as she becomes aware of Tanya’s glance, however, Cameron gives herself a visible shake and forces herself out of whatever reverie had been holding her captive. The whole thing is so un-Cameron-like that Tanya finds that she can’t stop staring.

“Yeah, she’s awesome. I mean—yeah, it’s great to be here. I . . . really like turkey.And stuffing. Stuffing’s great, too.” At Tanya’s confused look, Cameron seems to realize that she’s not making much sense and stuffs a couple of crackers into her mouth, apparently to stop herself from saying anything else.

Tanya suddenly remembers her ridiculous bet with Trip, which she hasn’t thought about since he brought it up at the Halloween office party last month. Cameron’s odd behavior probably doesn’t have anything to do with that, of course, but still—maybe . . . Tanya suddenly wishes that Trip would hurry up and get here, if only so she can enjoy rolling her eyes at his crazy shipping theories.

 

**§§§**

They have all just settled down at the table when Donna raises her glass. “Can I have everyone’s attention for just a moment?” Diane notes that Donna looks especially beautiful right now: her hair is loose, and she’s wearing a white silk blouse with black slacks that manages to appear both elegant and casual at the same time.

“I don’t want to give a speech, but I do want to say something.” Diane smiles to herself as she sees Haley looking a little horrified, an expression that she’s seen on the faces of both Jennifer and Kimberly more times than she’d like to admit. Have parents embarrassed their children from the beginning of time? She wishes that her daughters were home for this holiday, even though she knows that she’ll see both of them at Christmas. Diane shakes off this little frisson of sadness as she listens to Donna continue.

“This has been an exciting year for me, and I owe a lot of that to all of the people in this room. Each and every one of you has helped to make Phoenix a success. Even more, you’ve all made my life better than it has any right to be. You’re all . . . wonderful, and I’m lucky to have you. So on this day of thanks—thank you. For everything.” Donna’s voice is choking a little as she raises her glass to the group.

Diane knows that Donna can get emotional giving speeches, so she’s not overly surprised by this display. She does, however, notice that Donna is looking right at Cameron during most of it, and she sees that Cameron is listening with an attention so rapt that it borders on awe. At the end of Donna’s speech, Diane sees Cameron blinking back tears.

And suddenly, Diane understands why Donna had been asking about her relationship with Bos at their recent lunch. _Oh god_ , she thinks. _Oh, no._

It’s not as though she hasn’t suspected for a long time that there is a powerful _something_ between Donna and Cameron, a something that managed to survive all those years of angst and heartbreak, nourished in some liminal region between love and hatred. Almost a year ago, she had warned Donna against going to find Cameron in Florida. Donna hadn’t listened to her then, and Diane is not about to say anything this time around, not unless Donna asks her about it directly, and probably not even then. It’s not, she thinks, remotely her business. Still, she cares about Donna, and she was the one who saw just how shattered Donna was five years ago, after Cameron pushed her out of the browser project. She was the one, after all, who had to put Donna back together. Diane doesn’t trust Cameron not to hurt Donna like that again, however much she might have changed, and however successful Phoenix is becoming. Cameron might be charming and brilliant, but Diane is convinced that she’s also fundamentally broken, and falling in love with someone broken is never a great idea.

Diane watches Donna sparkle as she passes platters around the table, looks at Cameron beaming at nobody in particular as she absently takes a bite of mashed potatoes. _Don’t do this,_ she thinks. _It’s probably not going to end well. Just be friends and business partners and be glad you have that._ But, since this thought is completely inappropriate for Thanksgiving, and quite possibly inappropriate for any day at all, Diane sighs, hopes she’s wrong, and accepts the bowl of sweet potatoes that John is handing to her.

 

**§§§**

Trip had been surprised when Donna invited him for Thanksgiving, and he has a suspicion or two that Cameron had something to do with it. Still, however it came to be, he’s definitely pleased to be here; he’s always up for any excuse to hang out with Tanya, and actual roasted turkey is a whole lot better than the deli sandwiches he’d have ended up eating if he stayed home alone and worked.

Bos is expertly carving the turkey and putting slices on plates as they’re passed his way. He catches Trip’s eye. “White or dark?”

“I’m a breast man through and through.” Trip smirks and forces himself not to glance at Tanya as he says it. Still, out of the corner of his eye, he’s pleased to see her lips twitch just a little bit.

Bos laughs. “I’ll bet you are,” he says, piling slices of white meat on Trip’s plate.

Trip takes the plate back, adds a couple of heaping spoonfuls of stuffing to it when Tanya hands him the bowl, dumps gravy on everything, and starts to dig in. _This is really great_ , he thinks. It’s been quite awhile since he’s had a real Thanksgiving dinner. He moved to California about five years ago, and with one project or another and Comdex coming up every December, it always seems impossible to get away and fly back east to be with his mother and his brother in Indiana.

Trip tries to watch Donna and Cameron without obviously staring at them, but it doesn’t take too much detective work to see that they’re both, well, _glowing_ would be the only word that comes to mind. They’re also obviously making an effort not to keep grinning at each other, but they’re mostly failing resoundingly.He sees Cameron shoveling massive amounts of food into her mouth mechanically, clearly not really tasting anything, and he notes that Donna has barely taken a bite of anything at all.

Trip is trying to decide whether all that merely means that they’re still in the we’re-oblivious-to-our-epic-love phase, or whether something has actually _happened_ , when he notices that Donna touches Cameron’s hand as she passes her the cranberry sauce, leaving it there a tick longer than necessary. When he sees Cameron touching back, he knows that his bet with Tanya is over. There’s no doubt in his mind that Donna and Cameron are a couple, whether they’re going to announce it officially or not, and it happened by Thanksgiving. Tanya wins, and he owes her a dinner. His gaydar hasn’t failed him yet.

When Trip sees Tanya glancing at him, he indicates Donna and Cameron with his chin and waggles his eyebrows a little. She smiles, shaking her head, and Trip feels wonderful. He’s a competitive maniac, and he doesn’t remember ever being so happy about losing a bet before. Yeah, it won’t be a date, but Trip is an eternal optimist: that might come in time. At the very least, he’s going to try to make it a dinner to remember.

 

**§§§**

Katie volunteers to help Donna clear the table after dinner. As they’re scraping and rinsing the plates, Katie makes an elaborate show of clearing her throat. When Donna glances over, Katie cocks her head inquiringly.

Donna can’t help grinning at her. “Ok, yes. I told her I wanted to try this insane thing.”

Katie grins back with a thumbs-up sign. “I knew it!”

Donna suddenly looks a little nervous. “You did? I mean . . . how did you, exactly?”

“Nothing, really. Well, nothing aside from the fact that you and Cameron were smiling at each other like two idiots all during dinner.” Katie puts a plate into the dishwasher, looking very pleased with herself.

Donna shrugs and sighs a little. “I hope you’re the only one who noticed that. I mean, we literally just decided this morning, and we haven’t had much time to do any real processing. We’re definitely not in the telling people stage.”

Katie pats Donna’s arm. “Don’t worry. I’m sure I only noticed because I knew that it was possibility. Nobody else knows that, right?”

Donna shakes her head. “Nope. Yeah, you’re right. And everybody else probably has too much of their own stuff going on to pay attention to us. But were we _really_ smiling at each other like idiots?”

Katie picks up another plate to scrape, smiling a little herself as she does so. “Yes, you were. But that’s ok. It might have been the tryptophan from the turkey. Or you both might just have been feeling really, really thankful that the Pilgrims and the Indians managed to sit down to a dinner without killing each other. Who knows?”

Donna smiles back at her. “That tryptophan _is_ powerful stuff. Thanks, by the way. I think your question about what I’d say to Haley really put everything into perspective for me. There’s a lot that can go wrong here, but if things actually go right, well, that would be . . .”

“. . . wonderful,” Katie finishes, thinking how improbable it is that she and Donna actually seem to have become real friends, the kind of friends who talk to each other about their lives. It’s a lovely coda to her relationship with Gordon, one that she’s sure would have made him happy.

Donna’s eyes unfocus a little, and any traces of anxiety dissolves. “Yes, exactly. It’s been a long, long time since ‘wonderful’ was a thing in my life. Maybe it’s not impossible. Maybe this is going to be one of those unexpected, _good_ curve balls that life sometimes tosses us, in between all of the fast balls and grounders and fouls.”

“And the intentional walks. Don’t forget the intentional walks!” Katie likes the baseball metaphor; Gordon had never mentioned that Donna is a baseball fan. She makes a mental note to ask Donna about baseball at some future lunch.

“Those are the worst,” Donna agrees. They smile at each other companionably.

 

**§§§**

Bos sees Cameron slipping outside and settling into one of the chaise lounges by the pool. After a few minutes, he decides to follow her.

Cam hears him coming and turns her head. “Hey. I just wanted to hang here for a little bit before dessert.”

“Is this an alone time thing, or is it ok for other people to hang out here, too?” Bos notes how relaxed Cameron seems; whatever reason she’s out here, he doesn’t think it’s to brood. In fact, Cam had looked pretty darn happy all during dinner, much happier than he’s ever seen her look on any sort of holiday.

“You’re not other people,” Cam says, indicating the chaise lounge next to her with her chin. He accepts the tacit invitation and settles down next to her.

After a few moments of silence, Bos turns to look at Cam. “So, nice dinner. I’ve always been partial to Thanksgiving. Those mashed turnips and cranberry sauce . . . mmm, mmm!”

Cameron smiles. “Those turnips are actually rutabagas.”

Bos stares at her. “What’s the damn difference between a turnip and a rutabaga?”

“Dunno,” Cam shrugs. “I think turnips are whiter and rutabagas are sweeter.”

“Well, whatever they are, they were great,” Bos hesitates and then continues. “You’re lookin’ pretty good, Cam. Is that just the turkey talking, or did that . . . thing you were talking about when you stopped by work out for you?”

Bos watches as Cam’s whole face lights up and an almost foolishly comical smile spreads across her face. “Yeah, it did. It worked out. It’s pretty . . . awesome. I can’t quite believe it, really. I mean, good stuff doesn’t usually happen to me.”

Bos thinks about just how much he’s grown to love this girl over the years, how she’s the one who completely changed his own life for the better. “We ever going to stop talking about this in code? Can you tell me what’s goin’ on?”

Cam shakes her head. “Not just yet. Sometime, but not now. It’s too . . . new.”

 _I wasn’t born yesterday_ , Bos thinks. _The only thing that can make a person look like that is bein’ in love_. He wonders if Joe is back in her life, or if she’s met some other guy. He’s hoping it’s the latter. Much as he’s come to like Joe, and much as he knows that Joe and Cameron really do love each other, something about the two of them as a couple just never felt right to him.

When Bos doesn’t respond right away, Cam looks at him a little anxiously. “That’s ok with you, right? I promise I’ll tell you everything eventually.”

Bos smiles at her. “Course it’s ok. You just take your time, darlin’. I’m just glad you got something good goin’ on.”

 

**§§§**

Haley rushes to the door as soon as she hears the doorbell ring. She knows that it’s Jordan, who promised to stop by for dessert after she could slip away from her own family dinner.

As Haley expects, she opens the door to find Jordan, smiling in a way that makes Haley want to drag her away so they can fool around without any interruptions for small talk with friends and relatives. She knows that Jordan probably wants that, too.

“Hey,” says Jordan, touching Haley’s hand. “Did I miss dessert?”

Haley shakes her head. “Nope. Everyone is just sitting down for it now. Come on in.” She leads Jordan to the dining room table, where indeed plates are just beginning to be passed for slices of pie.

“Jordan,” says Donna, beaming at her. “We’re so glad you could make it. What kind of pie would you like? We’ve got apple, blueberry, and pumpkin. If you like, you can have a little piece of each.”

Haley winces, wondering why her mother is coming on so strong over something dumb like pieces of pie. And why is she smiling like that? Come to think of it, she’s been smiling that way pretty much all day. “Blueberry would be amazing, thanks,” she hears Jordan answer politely. Haley wonders if Jordan thinks there’s anything weird about her mom.

“Blueberry’s my favorite, too.” Haley hears Cameron saying this, and when she looks at her she realizes that Cam is also smiling at Jordan a little too broadly. What’s going on with the two of them right now?

Haley is relieved when they’ve all finished their pie and she and Jordan can go into Haley’s room. Her mom usually wants her to leave the door open, but since everyone else is busy with dessert, even an open door feels relatively private. “Sorry that my mom was so acting so nuts. I think holidays make her nervous or something.”

Jordan stares at her. “What do you mean? She was great. She’s always great.”

Privately, Haley is happy that Jordan likes her mother so much. She knows that Jordan doesn’t get along well with her own parents, and Haley is kind of proud that Jordan seems to like hanging out with Donna (and Cameron too, actually). “I just think she was acting kind of strange, and so was Cam.”

“Strange how?” One thing that Haley loves about Jordan is how interested she always seems to be in whatever Haley happens to be talking about.

“I dunno. Strange _happy_. Like, she was smiling all day, even when there was nothing to smile about. Maybe she and Cam managed to get stoned before everyone got here.” Haley actually thinks that this is a real possibility.

“Just be glad that she’s happy. My mom just scowled at everyone all during our dinner and didn’t say a word.” Haley sees a shadow cross Jordan’s face, and she wishes she could make it go away. She’s never told Jordan that she kind of hates Jordan’s family, especially because she’s pretty sure that Jordan’s mother hates her.

“Let’s not talk about families anymore,” says Jordan, bending over to kiss Haley. Haley sighs, thinking how much better her life is right now than it was last year.

“Do you think it’s weird that you have practically the same name as my father?” Haley asks. It comes out of her mouth before she has time to consider it, and it’s probably not the most romantic thing to say during a make-out session.

Jordan, however, just laughs. “Do you think it means you’re secretly dating your father?”

Haley shrugs, feeling a little foolish. “Not really. You’re a lot prettier than he was.” She waits for the flash of sadness that usually comes when she thinks about her dad, but this time it doesn’t happen.

Jordan kisses her again. “I call it a coincidence. If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of coincidences in life.”

Haley nods. “Yeah, there are. He would have liked you. I wish you could have met him.”

“I wish that, too.” Jordan is looking at her fondly, and Haley feels more thankful for everything than she ever remembers feeling on Thanksgiving before.

 

**§§§**

Much later, while saying good night to Haley’s mom and thanking her for the pie, Jordan notices a peculiar look on Cameron’s face, the sort of look that Jordan has often seen on Haley, the sort of look that she knows she has herself when Haley is being especially awesomely geeky.There’s no doubt at all that this peculiar look of Cam’s is aimed right at Donna, as if watching Donna saying goodnight to her daughter’s girlfriend is the most fascinating thing that has ever happened to Cameron. Jordan wonders if getting stoned could possibly last all day like this, or if there might actually be something more going on than Haley realizes. Then she shrugs and dismisses the idea from her mind. Haley’s family is great, way better than any family she’s ever known, but it’s a lot more fun to think about Haley herself and not worry about anyone else. If anything is really up with Haley’s mom and Cameron, there will be time enough to think about it when it becomes an actual thing in Haley’s life. _No wonder Haley’s mom was so cool about Haley and me_ , Jordan thinks. She wonders if Haley knows just how lucky she is to have a mom like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is our comic relief chapter. I hope it didn't make anyone too impatient!


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron experiences something new.

Everything with Donna is immediately so serious—so _real_ —that Cameron occasionally wonders about her apparent lack of concern regarding where it all might be heading, or even regarding the breathtakingly odd fact that that this serious thing is with a woman and not a man. In truth, she’s not doing much _thinking_ about anything at all. She’s so filled up with the present that everything other than _right now_ seems part of a world belonging to someone else entirely. Cam knows that she had loved Joe, and (she guesses, although now it seems less clear) that she had also loved Tom. Yet during those past relationships, on some level she had also always felt a part of herself insisting on stubbornly remaining a bit outside, watching and wary, bracing for the inevitable time when things would begin to fall apart. But with Donna, everything is different. Here, right now, is all there is, and nothing within holds back from this new world that the two of them are beginning to build together. As soon as Donna decided that she wanted to try, all of the usual cracks and escape routes that Cameron has always known apparently vanished, quickly and mysteriously and without a trace.

Those first days after Thanksgiving weekend are a blur to both of them, a blur of days struggling to work, a blur of nights in the darkened living room after Haley has finally gone to bed, the flickering of the unwatched television providing a comfortingly familiar backdrop to this strange, wonderful new routine of soft touches and kisses. Cameron has never been much of a cuddler before, but on these nights she finds herself wanting nothing more than to fold herself into Donna and just feel the _us_ of the two of them together, a feeling of simultaneous utter security and intoxicating excitement. She wonders if it can be like this forever.

On one of these late nights, Cameron is beginning to doze off when she feels Donna’s hand on her cheek. “We probably should get to bed. We’ve got that investor meeting tomorrow at 9:00.”

Cameron groans a little. She had promised Donna that she’d be there too, but the idea of waking up early to get to a meeting with spreadsheet wonks doesn’t sound overly appealing right now. “Can’t you . . .”

Donna kisses her softly. “Nope. They want to see both of us, and they’d probably feel more confident about giving us some development money if we didn’t show up looking as though we haven’t slept for a week.”

Cam tries to sit up, but then collapses again with her head in Donna’s lap. “Well, we _haven’t_ slept much for a week. Maybe they’ll think we’re so dedicated to MusicLand that we’ve been pulling a lot of all-nighters. It might impress them.”

Donna laughs, stroking Cameron’s hair. “I’m pretty sure that they already think that we’re dedicated. But it would be good if we could form coherent sentences when we meet with them in six hours.”

Cameron sighs, and with a great effort manages to sit up for real this time. She and Donna look at each other for a long beat.

Now it’s Donna’s turn to sigh. “I know what you’re thinking.”

Cam smiles at her. “You do? So what am I thinking?”

“You’re thinking about how much more convenient all this would be if we could actually sleep in the same bed all night, instead of fooling around on a couch and then stumbling off to our own bedrooms at some wee hour of the morning.” Donna is looking at her in a way that makes Cameron never want to leave this living room ever again.

“Well, I’m not _not_ thinking about that, but I know that all good things come to those who wait. And for the record, it’s not the ‘convenience’ of it that I’m focusing on.” Cameron sighs again, thinking about how bad she’s always been at waiting for anything, which is probably why good things have been few and far between in her life.

“I know. I’m thinking about it too, but I just think it would be tricky to manage without telling Haley, and I think we need to wait on that for awhile.” Donna has a look of longing on her face that fills Cameron with a warmth she didn’t realize was actually possible outside of the sort of sappy novels that she’s never wanted to read.

“Don’t worry about it. This sneaking around has its own adolescent charms.” Cam grins at Donna, who looks relieved as she smiles back. And of course, Cameron knows that she’s right; everything about her life with Donna has its charms right now.

 

**§§§**

They manage to pull off the meeting fine, with both of them going into auto-pilot as they explain the projected growth of MusicLand for the beginning of the 1996 fiscal year. The potential investors are a group of young men eager to attach themselves to a project with real potential to disrupt the music industry, and there’s every indication that they consider MusicLand to be exactly the sort of thing for which they’ve been searching.

However well everything had gone, Cameron is still relieved that the meeting doesn’t drag on longer than the 90 minutes that had been scheduled and that nobody suggests going out for an early lunch. She’s glad that she and Donna apparently managed to impress the group, but she needs every bit of extra energy she has for her actual coding work, and meeting with suits exhausts her under the best of circumstances, even when she’s not spending half the night with Donna.

Trip pokes his head into the meeting room when Donna, Cameron, and Tanya are sitting at the table alone, discussing the next follow-up steps to keep the investors interested. “How was it?”

“Really great,” Tanya answers. “They seemed pretty blown away, actually.” Cameron notices how warmly she’s smiling at Trip.

Trip smirks. “I’m not surprised by that. I’ve worked with some of those guys before—they’re barely ambulatory under the best of circumstances. It wouldn’t take much air to make them topple over.”

Tanya rolls her eyes, Cameron snorts, and Donna answers him. “Well, any investor money is welcome at this point, so let’s be glad they seem to like us, for whatever reason. We need to expand if we’re going to keep up the pace that we’ve set.”

Cameron glances over at Donna—why _is_ it that every little thing Donna says these days seems to be the most profoundly brilliant statement ever uttered by a human being? She sees Trip noticing her expression, and she tries as hard as she can to force a scowl to erase whatever gooey softness he might be seeing there.

Trip’s lips twitch, as if he isn’t fooled in the least by the scowl. “Hey, Cam . . . do you have time for a round of Street Fighter before you take off?”

Cam glances at Donna, shrugs, then nods. Maybe an hour or so with a cathartic game like Street Fighter will dull a little of the Donna-longing that’s roaring inside her now, and then she’ll be able to get some actual work done this afternoon.

The two of them play a violent, silent game for about fifteen minutes, minutes in which Cameron is ruthlessly methodical in her destruction of Trip. For some reason, she’s started to enjoy playing first person shooter games, even though she’s profoundly uninterested in ever creating one herself. Trip, she admits, has actually become a pretty good gaming buddy. He’s no Gordon, of course, but Cam is glad to have him in her life anyway, and she’s actually found that Street Fighter is a good way to clear her mind and improve her mental focus. She’s so absorbed in manipulating her joystick, in fact, that she doesn’t quite catch what Trip is saying to her.

“Huh?” She keeps her eyes on the screen in front of them, not wanting to lose a strategic advantage.

“I said, are you and Donna . . . you know?” Trip isn’t looking at Cameron, so he can’t see her shocked expression.

Cam gapes at him without answering. Does he mean? . . . _Could_ he mean . . . ?

Trip finally pauses the game and clocks Cameron’s expression. “Hey, I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m just curious, is all. I know it’s none of my business, but you’re just both looking . . . pretty happy. It’s cool.” He unpauses the game and resumes playing, but it takes Cameron a second or two to shake off what just happened. _Donna is going to kill me,_ she thinks, even though she hasn’t officially done anything wrong, or even really confirmed what Trip apparently suspects. How would Trip, of all people, figure this out? She decides not to mention this odd little exchange to Donna until she absolutely has to, which she hopes won’t be for a long, long while.

 

**§§§**

On a Friday in December a couple of weeks before Christmas, Haley leaves for a week-long class trip to Washington, DC. When Jordan’s father arrives to take both girls to the airport, Cameron doesn’t think she’s ever felt quite so grateful for the public school system. What a marvelous idea it is to take high school juniors to the nation’s capital! Three cheers for an enhanced educational experience!

As soon as the car containing Haley and Jordan drives off, Donna and Cameron look at each other almost shyly. “We have a week,” Donna says in wonderment. “A whole week.”

“And two weekends, too. Haley won’t be back until next Sunday night. That’s ten days.” Cameron knows that it is, because she’s been counting those days for the past two weeks.

They both realize, without having to say anything about it openly, that this is the week—hell, this might be the _night_ —that their relationship will go beyond the Nick-at-Nite kissing sessions. They’ll be sleeping together all night, in the same bedroom, in the same bed.Cameron’s heart lurches a little at the mind-boggling nature of the very thought of it. It’s really happening, and it’s happening soon.

 

**§§§**

The two of them decide to stay at Donna’s house this weekend and save the Airstream for the weekend before Haley returns. _Bigger bed_ , Cameron thinks, wondering if that’s on Donna’s mind as well.

“So . . . Indian, maybe?” Donna sounds tentative, and Cam imagines that she’s trying to figure out the perfect pre-first-sexual-encounter cuisine for the two of them. She almost laughs out loud at the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. Life has gotten very interesting and very, very strange.

“Indian sounds great,” Cameron answers. “Tandoori chickenfor me, and maybe some Palak Paneer, too.”

“Ok. I think I’ll have some Rogan Josh, and definitely that coconut soup that I like.” Donna busies herself with the food details, not really looking at Cameron as she does so. _She’s thinking about tonight, too_ , Cameron surmises. They’re both going to be thinking about nothing else, regardless of what conversation they happen to be having at the time.

_This is crazy. We can’t possibly just have an ordinary dinner and chat, as if this is any old normal evening. Nothing is normal right now._

Cameron is just on the brink of saying something along these lines out loud when she notices that Donna, who has just picked up the telephone to order their dinner, is putting it down again. “I’m scared.” Donna’s voice is little more than a whisper, and she’s staring at the phone rather than at Cameron.

Cameron resists the urge to pretend that she doesn’t know what’s on Donna’s mind, to make a crack about how she’s often scared of Indian food, too. “Of what? Of the idea that maybe we’ll have sex, realize that this whole thing has been a terrible mistake, and run screaming for the hills?” Cam is so relieved to be talking about this looming sex elephant, rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist, that she blurts out the first thought that pops into her mind.

Donna gives a sudden laugh. “Yeah. I wasn’t going to put it quite that starkly, but . . . yeah.” Now she’s looking right at Cameron, the laughter fading as quickly as it had appeared.

Cameron takes Donna’s hand. “I’m not scared.” She realizes that, oddly, it’s completely true. She isn’t scared of what’s to come. She’s anxious, she’s impatient, she’s a little bit shell-shocked—but not scared. She wants this.

Donna looks at her. “Really? What if . . . what if you hate it? You’ve never . . .”

Cameron touches Donna’s cheek. “I won’t hate it.” She finds that she can’t say anything else, and she hopes that Donna understands how _much_ she won’t hate it.

Donna, eyes shiny with tears, looks right at Cameron. “Are you sure you’re ready? We can wait. It’s a big deal.”

“I’m ready. I’m . . . really ready.” Cameron means it as much as she’s ever meant anything before. “Besides, you’re the expert. You’ll show me the ropes.”

Donna smiles at her. “I’m no expert. We’ll need to figure it out together.”

Cameron nods. “That’s ok by me.” _It’s more than ok,_ she thinks.

Donna holds out her hand to Cameron, who takes it. Without further discussion, they both walk toward Donna’s bedroom, the Indian takeout long forgotten.

 

**§§§**

Cameron isn’t actually sure what she expected. She has known since Donna said yes that, eventually, they would be sleeping together. She has been telling herself not to expect the earth to move, that first times rarely perfect even under the best of circumstances, and that there’s a lot more to her relationship with Donna than the physical side of things. She has been expecting to have to work at it—after all, until she fell in love with Donna, she had always considered herself one hundred percent straight. It can’t be possible, she assumes, to go from that to being head-over-heels for another woman without a sexual hiccup or two. In all likelihood, it would be uncomfortable and strange at first, and Cam thinks that she’s completely ok with that. She’s sure, whatever the first time is like, it’ll get better.

So she isn’t prepared at all for what actually happens. Maybe the earth doesn’t literally _move_ , but the sheer intensity of the experience is something that Cameron has never felt before with another human being. ( _Really, truly, is there anything at all that Donna isn’t good at?_ ) It’s natural and soft, slow and tender, and very different from any sex that Cam has known before now. How, she wonders, can it be _this_ good and still be real?

Afterwards, Cameron and Donna look at each other for a couple of unbearably charged moments. “Ok?” Donna asks.

Dropping her head into the crook of Donna’s neck, Cameron can only close her eyes and nod.She wishes that she could manage to say more, that she could tell Donna just how lucky she feels right now to have so many different Donnas in her life—Donna the brilliant business partner, Donna the caretaker, Donna the goofball, Donna the articulate giver of speeches. And now, she also has this new Donna, the one who can make her feel _this_. It’s almost too much to believe.

Cameron knows that Donna gets it when she feels a hand stroking the back of her neck. Cameron opens her eyes and sees Donna’s soft smile. “Good,” says Donna, kissing her. She kisses back, and the beautiful haze of all-consuming gentleness and perfect feeling of safety begins anew.

 

**§§§**

They spend the rest of the weekend rarely leaving the bedroom, only scrounging around for food when they absolutely can’t fight their hunger pangs off any longer. It’s just about the best weekend of Cameron’s life.

On Sunday night, they finally get around to ordering the Indian food that they talked about on Friday, and it’s the most wonderful Indian food Cameron has ever tasted. She’s sopping up the last of Palak Paneer with her naan when she hears Donna saying something to her.

“What would you think about taking a couple of days off from work? I haven’t had a vacation day in a long time; really, the last vacation I took was right after Gordon died, and it wasn’t exactly restful.” Donna is asking this cautiously, as if she’s afraid of what Cameron might say.

Cam, however, thinks that, as plans go, this one is more than satisfactory. “I think . . . I can’t imagine a better way to spend a couple of days. But if you think those couple of days are going to restful, I have some terrible news for you.” They grin at each other, and the world dissolves once again, Palak Paneer unfinished and forgotten yet again.

 

**§§§**

Tuesday morning, Cameron wakes up slowly. As her eyes focus, she sees that Donna is sitting up in bed, watching her a little pensively.

“What is it?” Cam asks sleepily, looking at Donna and marveling at just how beautiful she can manage to look first thing in the morning.

“So, it’s kind of our anniversary today.” Donna is looking so solemn as utters this that Cameron can’t quite tell if she’s kidding or not.

“Is it? Are we going to be like Haley and Jordan and have an anniversary for every month we’ve been a couple? It hasn’t even been a month, anyway.” Cam knows that Donna is a little obsessed with dates, but this is the kind of thing that really only should matter in high school.

Donna shakes her head, smiling a little. “Nope. It’s December 12. It’s exactly a year since I had the idea in the diner that started . . . everything.”

“Wow.” _It doesn’t feel like a year_ , Cameron thinks. It feels . . . well, like more than a year, and less than a year, but definitely not a year. So much has happened that last year seems like several lifetimes ago.

“Yeah. Wow.” Donna turns and gives Cameron a soft, gentle kiss. “Who could have imagined that we’d ever end up here?”

Cameron sighs. “It was a good idea that you had.”

Donna nods. “It really was.”

Cameron lies back, finally thinking about what lies ahead. For the first time, she thinks that maybe, just maybe, the future won't actually be just another crappy version of the present.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sure some of you will be disappointed that there isn't more explicit smut in this chapter, but I'm not that kind of writer, and this isn't that kind of fic. (And the fic has now officially passed its halfway point. Amazing!)


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein dating ensues.

By the end of the holidays, Donna is exhausted. She normally loves Christmas, but this year is different. This year, she wishes more than anything that, as she had mentioned to Diane when they had lunch right before Thanksgiving, she could have been at least two people. One whole Donna Emerson was needed to be present for Haley and Joanie, to make certain that, for their sake, everything about this holiday season was as close to perfect as she could possibly make it. After all, this was only their second Christmas since Gordon died, and last year they hadn’t been together at all: Joanie and Haley had been in Thailand, and she had been on that crazy trip to Florida to see Cameron. Possibly to make up for that, this year Donna had splurged on presents that she knew her daughters would love—a new laptop for Haley, and a Nikon DSLR camera for Joanie (She had given Cameron a bootleg VHS tape of _The Star Wars Holiday Special_  and had been amused to see that Cam had given her one of _Santa Claus Conquers the Martians_.). She had also made doubly certain to have all of her daughters’ favorite holiday foods for Christmas Eve, as well as a Christmas morning brunch of Eggs Benedict and Belgian waffles. On the surface, it had all appeared to be as classically June Cleaver a holiday as anyone could have wished for, and yet Donna had felt the strain of it throughout, even as she genuinely loved seeing Joanie again and hearing all about her first semester in college.

The strain, of course, is because of the second Donna Emerson that she would have needed (and the one that she didn’t happen to have on hand) to function as Cameron’s girlfriend. But as an unfortunate side effect, the holidays put their relationship into some sort of suspended animation just at the point at which everything should rightfully have been speeding up. The two of them had very little time alone; certainly, there had been no way at all to spend a night in the same bed, either at Donna’s house or at the Airstream. Since Joanie and Haley tended to stay up late talking every night, Donna and Cameron hadn’t even had their customary Nick-at-Nite sessions as a second-choice backup plan. It’s as though, Donna reflects, they made it to the top of a roller coaster, and then, rather than rushing downward, were forced to sit there waiting endlessly for the track to be repaired. (She rolls her eyes to herself at this awful, clunky metaphor, but she finds she’s too tired to come up with a better one.)

Cameron, Donna thinks now, had really been incredible throughout those difficult weeks: she never grumbled about any of the extra socializing, the parties, the dinners, or anything else, and she had obviously been genuinely happy to see Joanie again and to spend even more time than usual with Haley. But Donna knows exactly just how much all of that cost Cam, who hates the holidays even under the best of circumstances. Donna thinks about last Christmas, remembers Cameron’s confession—and it’s so rare that Cam ever talks about her childhood to Donna, even now—that her father had loved Christmas, and that after he died Cameron just gave up on the holidays entirely. This year, Donna almost hadn’t been able to bear seeing Cameron surrounded by Christmas decorations and chatter, knowing how she must be feeling and how little of it she ever even allowed herself to acknowledge fully. Donna had ached to put her arms around Cam, to hold her long enough to draw out some of that pain and transmit just a little bit of the good things about that holidays in its place. But that, of course, had been impossible; all she could do was occasionally catch Cam’s eye and smile, hoping that this little bit of virtual contact provided some small comfort.

So all in all, even though she feels guilty about it, Donna breathes a sigh of relief on the Monday morning of January 8, 1996, when Haley goes back to school and when Joanie gets a ride to the airport with one of her friends to fly back to New York. Alone in the suddenly quiet kitchen, Donna and Cameron look at each other, a little unsure about how to resume after an interlude that had been, in point of fact, just about as long as the time that they were actually an official couple.

Donna is the first to speak. “We need to date.”

Cameron stares at her. “What?”

Donna tries to explain. “I mean, I know that we’re doing everything totally backwards, but I don’t want to lose out on the _dating_ part of all this. You know, where we go places and do things together. We shouldn’t skip that.”

“Well, we’ve been going places and doing things together for a year, haven’t we?” Cameron is looking a little puzzled by this whole conversation.

“Yeah, but we weren’t, well, _together_ when we did those things. It doesn’t really count as dating. I want to go somewhere fun with you, and then go out to dinner, and talk, and ask you whether you like the Beatles or the Stones better.” Donna knows that she probably sounds ridiculous right now, and she chalks it up to the endorphin rush that comes with the holidays finally being over and life returning to normal, or returning to this crazy thing that had just started to become her wonderful new normal.

Cameron, however, is smiling at her with that unexpectedly soft look that she sometimes has lately. “Beatles, of course Beatles. What else could it be?”

Donna smiles back faintly. “Actually, I can’t really answer that one myself. I like them both.”

Cameron snorts at this. “One of these days, you’re going to need to make an actual decision about something.”

Donna leans forward and kisses Cameron’s forehead softly. “I kind of think that I made an important one already.”

Cameron puts her head on Donna’s shoulder and sighs. “Yeah, you did. And ok, sure, let’s date. Why not? I’ve actually never really done that, even in high school. With Tom and Joe, it was mostly just work, dinner, sex, sleep, repeat.”

Donna’s runs her fingers through Cameron’s hair, so relieved to be able to touch her once again. “Let’s try for something a little different this time around.”

 

**§§§**

**dinner and a movie**

They decide that their first official date should be the classic combo of dinner and a movie (or, in this case, a movie and dinner) on the following Friday night, when Haley is sleeping over at Jordan’s for the weekend. Donna chooses _The American President_ , which has been out for a few weeks and, she thinks—she admits that she’s not entirely sure—has gotten pretty good reviews. Cameron just shrugs agreeably; it’s clear that choosing the dating venues is going to be Donna’s job.

During the movie, which she ends up somehow managing to watch and even to enjoy, Donna feels like a fourteen-year-old as she imagines what it would be like to do nothing more ambitious than holding Cameron’s hand in the darkened theater. She can’t, of course, but just the thought of it makes this evening an actual date and not simply an outing. Everything, she thinks, is utterly, astonishingly different from the way it was the last time she and Cameron saw a movie in a theater together.

At Donna’s insistence, Cameron chooses the post-movie restaurant: pizza, on the theory that whenever they order takeout pizza, it’s pretty close to cold by the time they get home with it. This is a chance to eat pizza hot out of the oven, which as everyone knows is how pizza is intended to be.

“So,” Donna says, biting into her slice of sausage-and-mushroom (luckily, she and Cameron like the same toppings on their pizza; she and Gordon never had), “how are you liking our first date?”

Cameron swallows her own mouthful of pizza, wipes her chin with a napkin, and grins. “I don’t have a lot to go by, but so far, so good. I’m glad that you wanted to do this. If it were up to me, I’d be ok with going from your house to Symphonic to the Airstream and back to your house forever.”

Donna nods. “Yeah, me too, really. But I think this might be good for both of us.”

“I liked the movie. It made me actually happy to be an American, and that doesn’t happen to me much,” Cameron is looking a little wistful.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Too bad every politician doesn’t have a script writer like Aaron Sorkin.” Donna scrapes the topping off her pizza and twirls it around her fork as if it were spaghetti. She has a weird habit of eating pizza like that: topping first, and then the crust all by itself. She shrugs when she sees Cameron smiling at her in bemusement; Cam will just have to get used to her quirks.

 

**§§§**

“Chilly sunrises or warm sunsets?”

“What?” Cameron, who has been lying with her head on Donna’s chest, picks it up to stare. It’s early morning, and neither of them want yet even to think about getting up and actually starting the day. Donna knows that her question must seem to come out of the blue.

“Which one would you pick?” Donna doesn’t know why these ritualistic getting-to-know-your-new-partner questions are important to her, especially when she and Cameron already know each other better than most people ever will. Still, she wants even more.

“Warm sunsets, totally. I never like anything about early morning. What about you? And you can’t say you like both, especially since you were the one to think up the question in the first place.”

“I actually love sunrises. I hardly ever have time these days to spend time in the morning really _looking_ at one, but I used to try to do it a lot long ago, before the kids were born. It’s just sort of an amazing way to start the day.” Donna feels a little embarrassed, and she wonders what Cameron will think of this.

Cam, however, is looking at her as if she’s just heard the most beautiful thing in the world. “Tell you what—I’ll wake up early for one of your sunrises if you watch a sunset with me. Deal?”

Donna feels a rush of gratitude for how wonderful her life is right now. “Deal,” she answers, putting her arms around Cameron and kissing her in a way that apparently is now as natural to her as breathing.

 

**§§§**

**Airstream picnic**

They’ve had many, many Airstream picnics over the past year, of course, so Donna wants this one to be special. She purchases tiny gourmet sandwiches, ripe strawberries and grapes, stuffed dates, hummus and chips, brie and crackers, and—because she knows how much it will please Cameron—different kinds of candy. She puts all of that food into an actual picnic basket, and brings along a picnic blanket and a thermos of lemonade. Cameron, she can tell, is duly impressed.

"You’re pretty good at this dating stuff, you know?” Cameron is eating a handful of grapes and looking at Donna fondly. “Did you and Gordon . . . do it a lot?” Cam asks this last question tentatively, as if she’s never quite sure how wise it is to bring up Gordon.

Donna, however, finds that she doesn’t mind the question at all. “When we first got together in college, we did plenty of stuff together—movies, bowling, art exhibits. It was really fun. But soon enough, life happened. I got pregnant, we had Joanie, we were both working . . . that whole _fun_ part of our life just got lost in the shuffle.”

Cameron is looking at her with an unusual intensity. “I don’t want that to happen with us.”

Donna sighs. “I don’t either. I don’t think it will. We’re . . . different.” She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t really want to think about everything that went wrong with her marriage to Gordon.

Donna feels Cameron taking her hand. “I like that we’re different.”

Donna remains quiet, just feeling how very much she likes that they’re different, too. As always, Donna is surprised at just how peaceful and relaxed she always feels on Cameron’s land. “I’ve really loved coming here over the last year. This place is . . . great.”

Cameron takes a bite of one of the little ham and cheese sandwiches and smiles. “I think so, too. I never thought I’d ever like living in the country, but when I saw this place, I just wanted it, even if it didn’t totally make sense, even though it was so far away from the city. I’m glad you like it, too.”

Donna chooses a sandwich of her own. “It’s weird how much I love it. I always hated camping; Gordon was the outdoor guy, and I just went along with it. But this place . . . it’s just _you_. Don’t ever sell it.”

“I won’t.” Cameron looks very happy.

 

**§§§**

Later, when Donna and Cameron are lying together on the Airstream’s narrow bed, dozing a little, Donna drowsily thinks of another question that she wants to ask. “Hey . . . have you ever kept a journal?”

Cameron doesn’t answer right away. “I kept one while I was in Tokyo. I’d never done anything like that before.”

Donna feels a pang, knowing exactly why Cameron would have felt the need for a journal in Tokyo. She doesn’t say anything, but she feels Cameron shift beside her, and she’s pretty sure that Cameron feels the pang as well.

Cameron slides her head onto Donna’s ribcage. “I wrote a lot about Mutiny. I just . . . needed to do that.”

Donna feels the choking sensation that comes whenever she thinks about that time and what she did. “Cameron . . .”

Cam interrupts her. “It’s ok. It was a long, long time ago. I don’t even have those journals anymore, and I’m glad I don’t.” Cam kisses Donna, as if in an attempt to show her just ok it all actually is.

Donna sighs, closes her eyes, wondering if she’s ever going to be able to forgive herself for the past, no matter how different the future might be.

 

**§§§**

**Computer History Museum**

To Donna’s surprise, Cameron suggests that the two of them spend a rainy Saturday afternoon at a new exhibit on Ada Lovelace. Donna agrees enthusiastically, both because she too is interested in the exhibit and because she’s happy to think that Cam might be enjoying their dates enough to participate in planning them.

Donna and Cam are quiet as they study everything in the large exhibit, reading about Ada Lovelace. In 1843, they learn, Lovelace published a translation from the French of an article that included the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems, which is why Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer.

Cameron is the first to say something. “She’s always kind of been my hero.”

Donna nods, knowing exactly what Cam means. “There never were too many other girls interested in tech when I was growing up. It’s nice to think that someone like Lovelace was around in the nineteenth century.”

Cameron looks pensive. “She was the first person to see that computers could be something more than just math, you know? I wish she could have seen everything that we are now. She would have loved the Internet.”

“Yeah, she would have. I’ll bet she would have been pretty happy about MusicLand, too.” Donna thinks about all of the challenges that she and Cameron have faced over the years, how they moved through the Silicon Valley boy’s club together, or at least, together for awhile. She doesn’t usually dwell on how hard it’s been to be a woman in a male-dominated field, but she’s thinking about it now.

Cameron, it seems, is thinking about it as well. “Do you remember when you recovered that data that I lost at Cardiff?”

Donna smiles. “I’m not likely to forget that. We had a pretty rocky first encounter, didn’t we?”

Cameron’s grins back. “Yeah, we did. But even then, even when I called you a mom, or whatever I said, I was kind of glad to see another woman doing computers.”

“I was, too. I’d never seen a woman write code like yours. I was glad to know that you existed, even if I never thought we’d be . . . anything together. But I liked thinking that you were out there, writing beautiful code andgiving everyone hell.” God, Donna thinks, that was all such a long time ago; several lifetimes ago, really.

Later, when they’re sitting in a nearby cafe, drinking coffee and listening to the rain on the roof, Cameron suddenly breaks the silence. “I really love rainy afternoons.”

Donna nods. “Yeah, me too. I always have. I guess we won’t need to do that question.”

Cameron rolls her eyes. “What question is that?”

“Rainy afternoons or sunny mornings,” Donna lifts an eyebrow and smiles.

“You do know that these questions of yours are kind of ridiculous, don’t you? Especially for people like us, who have known each other for—what is it now?—twelve years?” Cameron takes a bite of brownie as she finishes the sentence.

“Give or take,” says Donna, thinking about the “take” part of it, the seven years in that twelve in which she and Cameron lived on opposite sides of the world and never spoke.

Donna sees a flash of something in Cameron’s eyes, and she knows that Cam is recalling those lost years too. “Yeah, well,” says Cameron, clearly trying to push the thought away, “no question about rainy afternoons being better than sunny mornings. Sunny mornings are . . . too much pressure. You feel that you can’t waste them, so everything ends up seeming like not enough. But rainy afternoons—everything there is just _extra_ , you know?”

“I do know,” says Donna, thinking about how much she loves how Cameron sees the world. “Rainy afternoons are perfect.”

 

**§§§**

**Miniature Golf**

Donna doesn’t think it counts as a date, because Haley asked them if they wanted to join her (and Jordan, of course) for a round of miniature golf. Haley looks a little abashed, both at the nerdiness of the thing itself and at the uncoolness of asking your mother along on one of your dates. She mutters that it was Jordan’s idea, which actually warms Donna’s heart. She couldn’t have asked for a better first girlfriend for Haley.

“Of course it counts,” says Cameron. “It’s a double-date.”

“We’re not double-dating with my sixteen-year-old daughter and her girlfriend, especially when they don’t even know that we’re a couple.” Donna has serious misgivings about this whole event. She imagines that, when they finally tell the girls, Haley will be retrospectively mortified.

Cameron snickers. “This will be one of those stories that we’ll end up telling years later. It’s going to be awesome.”

Donna doubts that, but she gives in because of the heartwarming “years later” and because she finds Cameron’s enthusiasm slightly adorable.

The mini-golf course is large and surprisingly challenging. Donna is actually pretty good at it: her father taught her the basics of golf at an early age, and she finds that the muscle memory of it remains. Haley holds her own, but Jordan and Cameron are pretty hopeless. Neither of them seem to mind, however, and Donna enjoys listening to them tease one another. So, apparently, does Haley.

“Mom and I are killing the two of you,” Haley says, grinning in a way that Donna thought she’d never see again after Gordon died. “You might as well give up now.”

“It’s the Clark family curse,” Cameron answers. “You’re all doomed to be incredibly good at things nobody else cares about. You should have seen your dad with the underwater world in Super Mario.”

Donna wonders if bringing up Gordon will mute the happy buzz going through the group, but it doesn’t seem to. Haley just smiles back at her. “Winning is winning.”

Jordan nudges Haley. “Cut-throat to the end.” Donna looks at all three of them fondly, marveling that everything in her life that she has now is actually real.

 

**§§§**

**The Roxie Theater**

When Donna reads that San Francisco’s Roxie Theater (in business since 1909) will be screening a double feature of _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_ and _E.T._ , she knows that she and Cameron have to go.

“I can’t believe that you’ve never seen _E.T._ ,” Donna says after she mentions the plan to Cameron at breakfast. “How did you miss that one?”

“Well,” Cam answers, crunching a piece of toast, “I was in my last year of college when it came out. That was just a little bit before I met Joe, come to think of it. Anyway, I was busy, and it seemed like a cheesy kid’s movie.”

Donna shakes her head. “It’s not cheesy. It’s just . . . great. You have to see it.”

Cameron shrugs, but grins in spite of her obvious attempt to appear skeptical. “Sounds like I _am_ going to see it. It’s cool. At least _Close Encounters_ will be good.”

 During both movies, Donna finds herself looking at Cam almost as much as she watches the screen, just to see her reactions. She’s smugly pleased to see that Cameron actually appears enthralled with _E.T.,_ and Donna swears—although it’s hard to tell in the dark—that Cam tears up during the “I’ll be right here” scene. Cameron, Donna thinks (not for the first time) is a person of deep feeling. Back in Mutiny days, Donna sometimes found Cameron’s emotional reactions exasperating. Now she finds them never short of endearing.

They go out for some Thai food after the movies, and Donna decides not to tease Cameron about _E.T._ They order way too much food, planning to bring back leftovers for Haley. Everything is delicious, the way food always seems to be during one of their dates.

Cameron is twirling Pad Thai on her fork and shoveling it into her mouth. Before she fully swallows, she’s asking Donna a question. “Hey, do you believe in aliens?”

Donna’s lips twitch a little. “Is that a getting-to-know-you dating question?”

Cam shakes her head and takes another bite. “Nope. Just curious. I kind of do.”

Donna thinks about it. “Well, it comes down to math for me. The universe is so huge, and there are so many galaxies, and planets in those galaxies. I don’t think it’s statistically likely that we’re the only ones out there.”

Cameron squints at her thoughtfully. “I wonder if the aliens mess up their lives as much as we can mess up ours.”

Donna shrugs. “Probably. But I hope sometimes, once in awhile anyway, their lives can be as great as ours can be.”

They look at each other, and Donna knows that she has the same foolish grin that she sees on Cameron right now.

 

**§§§**

**Morrison Planetarium**

On a gloomy Saturday in late February after brunch with Haley and Jordan (who leave to work on a robotics science fair project that they’re doing together), Cameron suggests that they spend the afternoon at the Morrison Planetarium. Donna thinks that it’s a perfect idea. She hadn’t realized that Cameron was at all interested in astronomy.

“Of course I am,” says Cameron, when Donna says this to her. “I always have been. What’s Star Trek without the stars?”

Although it was one of the places that Gordon took her in college, Donna hasn’t been to a planetarium in years. Are planetariums, she wonders now, some sort of universal dating site for nerds? Whatever the case, she’s fascinated and moved by the spectacle of stars and planets and twinkling meteors in the darkened dome above them. It makes her feel very small, very insignificant, and yet part of something much bigger than herself. She sees from the intensity of Cameron’s expression, barely visible but still discernible, that Cam is experiencing much the same thing. Donna hesitates for a moment, but then she takes Cameron hand and squeeze it a little. Without looking at her, Cameron squeezes back. Donna closes her eyes for a moment, just savoring this moment that she thought would never be possible. After all, in all the vastness of the universe, beneath Carl Sagan’s billions and billions of stars, does it really matter if anyone happens to look over and see her holding Cameron’s hand? They’re insignificant specks, and who really cares what the other insignificant specks might think about anything? Donna suddenly feels light and free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that this chapter is mostly silly fluff, but I like thinking about Donna and Cameron enjoying their geeky dates. I hope you do, too!


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein others are told.

On a late afternoon Saturday in early March, they’re lying together on the Airstream bed, recovering from a day spent mostly outdoors. Cameron is drowsily wondering if she can manage to rouse herself enough to suggest collecting some wood for the campfire when she hears Donna saying something.

“So, Joanie’s coming home next weekend.” Donna is now sitting up, hugging her knees, and looking as though something is on her mind.

Cameron frowns a little. “Why? It’s not spring break already, is it? Is anything wrong?”

Donna shakes her head. “Nope. It’s just that she won’t be back here for spring break in April—she wants to go to Boston with some friends. That means that she’ll also miss Haley’s birthday, so she thought coming home for a long weekend would make up for it.”

Cameron considers this. She and Donna have never really talked about it, but she had sort of thought that maybe they’d want to tell the girls about the two of them the next time Joanie was home, or at least _consider_ telling them. But now that “the next time Joanie was home” is so very close, she wonders if Donna is ready for that.

She doesn’t have to wonder long. “Do you think we should tell them?” Cameron is surprised at how steady, almost matter-of-fact, Donna sounds.

Cameron hesitates. “I mean . . . I want to. It’s kind of feeling to me like we’re lying to Haley at this point, and I don’t like that. But if you’re not ready to do it yet, I understand.”

Donna sighs. “I don’t know what ‘ready’ is, not really. I want them to know. I want to be able to sleep in the same bed with you and not be worried about being caught by my teenage daughter. But I’m also scared to death about telling them, even though that’s ridiculous.”

Cam strokes the back of Donna’s neck and doesn’t answer right away. “I think they’ll be ok with us.”

Donna closes her eyes. “I think so, too, rationally. But what if we’re wrong?”

“Well, we have to tell them sometime, but it’s ok if sometime isn’t next weekend.” Cameron tries to imagine how this conversation with Joanie and Haley will go, but the mental picture doesn’t come.

“No, let’s do it. I want us to do it.” Cameron hears Donna trying to bully her voice into sounding confident and strong, but she’s not quite managing it.

“So what about telling other people?” Cam is a little surprised to find herself asking this question, because it’s not really something that she has planned to say out loud, at least not yet.

Donna looks at her. “Other people? Like who?”

Cameron shrugs. “I’d . . . kind of like to tell Bos. Also, even though it’s weird, I’d like to tell Joe.” Cameron realizes how true that is; telling Bos and Joe will somehow make this whole thing even more real than it already is, and she wants it to be as real as it can possibly be.

Donna doesn’t say anything for a moment. “If you tell Bos, we’d have to tell Diane, too. And that might mean that people at work will figure it out. As for Joe, well . . .”

Cameron squeezes her eyes closed and takes a deep breath. Might as well get this part over with. “The thing is . . . Trip sort of already knows.”

“What? How?” Donna’s voice rises an octave, and Cameron finds she can’t quite look at her.

“He, um . . . he kind of asked me when we were gaming together. I didn’t really answer, but I didn’t say we weren’t, either. He just said that we looked happy. I sort of think that . . . he liked the idea.” Cameron finally glances at Donna and is relieved to see that she looks more stunned than angry.

Donna sighs. “Ok,” she says, putting her hand on Cameron’s arm. “It’s ok. It’s not your fault. And Trip’s really been different ever since I took over as managing partner. He’s not quite the awful, dweeby little worm that I always thought he was.” She manages a smile.

Cam lets out a breath. She suddenly realizes that her hands are shaking, and she hopes that Donna doesn’t notice. “I just . . . it all would be easier, if everyone knew. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about people finding out.”

“I know. I kind of hate it, because I’m . . . I’m just not good at talking to people about anything, really. I think I could go a long, long time without needing to tell anyone about us. But on the other hand, I don’t want to give Haley the idea that there’s anything shameful and wrong about having a girlfriend. I guess needing to be a decent parent has to trump everything else.” Donna is looking at Cameron a little ruefully, and Cam has never loved her more.

“So we’re telling people?” Cam is a little astonished at where this whole conversation has gone.

Donna nods. “Yeah, we’re telling people. Starting with Haley and Joanie next weekend.”

Donna lies down again; Cameron puts an arm around her and pulls her close. They don’t say anything else to each other for a long time after that.

 

**§§§**

It’s cold and raw outside on the Friday night of Joanie’s return. Donna decides to roast a chicken and make mashed potatoes, and Joanie and Haley both tease her about this unusual show of domesticity.

“What, no apple pie?” Joanie asks as she helps clear away the plates after dinner. She doesn’t remark on the fact that Donna’s plate is nearly as full as it started out—she and Haley have been yakking nonstop, so she probably doesn’t even notice. Cameron has managed to finish her meal, but she might as well have been eating sawdust.

 “We can have some ice cream later, but first . . . I have something that I’d like to talk to you about.” Donna glances at Cameron, who finds herself becoming rigid.

Joanie and Haley both grow quiet, probably unnerved by their mother’s serious tone. “Is something wrong?” Haley’s voice is small. “You’re not . . . like, nobody’s sick or anything, right?”

With a lurch, Cameron realizes what “I have something that I’d like to talk to you about” can mean to people who have lost a parent. She pushes away a sudden memory of the day she found out about the death of her father and tries to focus on the present.

Donna, for her part, looks as though someone just punched her hard in the gut. “Oh, honey, no . . . it’s nothing like that. Really, I’m fine. So is Cameron.”

Haley lets out a relieved huff, and Joanie touches her sister’s shoulder. Nobody says anything at all for a moment or two, and then Joanie starts to look a little impatient. “Are we supposed to listen to this talk telepathically?”

Donna smiles a little and then takes a breath. Cameron wishes she could grab her hand to make it easier, but she knows that Donna has to do this part by herself. All Cam can do is sit here and wonder whether it might have been better if Donna had talked to the girls alone, if Cam were merely an awkward appendage to something that should have been a private family interaction.

“Ok, so . . . I’m not really sure how to do this, so I’m just going to say it. Cameron and I . . . well, we’ve decided to start dating. Each other, that is.” Donna’s voice is shaking, and Cameron can’t look at either her or at the girls. She waits to see which of them will be the first to speak.

It turns out to be Haley. “You mean you’re . . . gay? How did this . . . Were you always . ..” Haley sounds stunned, and Cameron can hardly blame her. Joanie still hasn’t said anything at all.

When Cameron finally looks up, she sees Donna going over to Haley and putting her arms around her. “Sexuality can be complicated for some people. I . . . had a relationship with a woman in college, before I met your father. But I never thought of myself as gay, or even really as bisexual. I was completely in love with Gordon in every way possible, and I never thought of being with a woman again until, well, until I did.”

Haley looks as though she’s trying to absorb this. “How long have you and Cam been . . .”

“Not long. Well, a couple of months.” Donna pushes Haley’s bangs away from her forehead. Haley doesn’t answer.

Now Joanie is speaking. “A couple of months? Were you . . . at Christmas, the last time I was here?”

Donna nods, a little reluctantly. “It had really just started then. I didn’t want to tell you both, in case there . . . didn’t end up being anything to tell.”

“And now there is something to tell,” Joanie says, looking a little too inscrutable for Cam’s comfort level.

Donna nods. “Yes, now there is.”

Haley hesitates. “So if we don’t like it . . . would you stop?” Cameron holds her breath as she waits for Donna’s reply.

Donna strokes Haley’s hair. “No, I wouldn’t.” She says it simply and with a great deal of love. “But I hope you won’t feel that way.” Cameron exhales, more relieved than she could ever express.

Haley nods. “I get that. I wouldn’t stop if you didn’t want me to be with Jordan, either.”

Donna lifts an eyebrow and smiles faintly. “Oh, really?”

Haley grins a little back at her. “Really. It’s ok. I mean, I think it’s ok. I’m just . . . surprised.”

Donna laughs a little. “I’m surprised, too.”

Haley takes a breath. “Are . . . does anyone else know?”

“Not yet. We wanted to tell you first, but we’re going to tell a few other people—Diane and Bos, and . . . Joe.”

Haley appears to think about that for a moment. “Is it all right if I . . . tell Jordan?”

Donna glances at Cameron, who shrugs an assent. “Sure, that would be fine. I know you want to talk to her about this, and you should.”

“Thanks.” Haley is starting to look a little less dazed.

“Do you want to ask me—us—anything, either of you?” Donna is looking intently at both of her daughters, as if trying to trying to crawl inside their heads and discover their thoughts.

Haley looks at her, starts to say something, and then stops.

“What is it? It’s ok; you can ask me anything.” Donna has her arms around Haley again.

“What’s, like, going to be different? I mean, Cameron already lives here.” Haley is flushing a little as she asks the question.

Donna glances at Cameron for an instant, and Cam gives her a look that she hopes will be reassuring. “Well, for one thing, Cam and I will probably be sleeping in my bedroom. And if you’re not careful, you may be forced to see us kiss every now and again.” Cameron marvels at Donna’s ability to joke at all; she herself can’t seem to breathe as she waits for Haley’s reaction. _This is everything,_ she thinks. _It’s done. They’ve officially Been Told._

When Haley’s reaction is to snicker, Cam draws a relieved mouthful of air into her lungs at the sound of it. “OK, I think I can handle that, as long as it doesn’t happen too often. Um, can I, like, go now? I kind of want to . . .”

“You want to go talk to Jordan,” Donna finishes for her. “It’s ok. You can go.”

After Haley leaves, Donna turns to Joanie, who has been sitting and quietly listening. “So how about you?”

Joanie shrugs. “I guess I’m not totally surprised.”

Donna gives her a bemused look. “You’re not?”

“Nope.” Joanie smirks a little. “And it’s fine with me, if that matters. But . . . Cameron, can I talk to youalone?”

Startled, Cameron stares at Joanie, and then at Donna. “Um, sure. Should we . . .”

“I’ll just go into the kitchen; I can start dishing out that ice cream. Just yell when you’re ready for me.” Donna is trying to sound casual, and she’s actually succeeding better than Cameron might have expected.

After Donna has left the room, Joanie turns to Cameron and gives her a direct, searching look. “Can you promise me that you’re not going to bail on her?”

Cameron feels as though Joanie has physically assaulted her. “What do you mean?”

“I just think you . . . run away. I mean, that’s what you sort of did with Tom, and with Joe. And I’m telling you, if you did that to my mom, it would . . . it would just kill her.” Joanie looks so serious that Cam wonders when exactly it was that Joanie had become an adult and she herself had turned into a child. She feels like crying.

Cameron takes a deep, steadying breath and answers with the truth. “All I can promise you is that I’m in this—I’m all in. I don’t want to be anywhere else, ever.”

Joanie nods. “Just don’t hurt her, ok? You don’t know how she was, after you went back to Tokyo. She . . . I don’t want her to be like that again, not ever.”

Cameron smiles at Joanie, moved by how much she cares. “Or what? You’ll kill me with a shovel?”

Joanie stares at her. “What?”

“Never mind. I don’t even know myself.” Cameron grins at the peculiar look Joanie is giving her.

“I’m glad you guys are together. I think . . . I think it’ll be good.” Joanie is looking a little oddly shy.

Cameron nods at her, relieved that everything had gone as well as it had. “I think it will be, too. So far, it’s off to a pretty decent start.”

Still, after Joanie goes into the kitchen to tell Donna it was safe to come out before the ice cream melted, Cam feels a flash of worry. Can she really trust herself not to mess this whole thing up? She wishes she could be a hundred percent confident that she could, but she’s never been a hundred percent confident about anything. What she told Joanie is completely true—she’s all in, as all in as she could ever be. She just has to hope that “all in” will be enough.

 

**§§§**

That night Cameron and Donna sleep in Donna’s bedroom for the first time with Haley home, and it feels both liberating and strange. Cameron thinks about the odd fact that they’ll be able to do this every single night from now on, that the sneaking around and hiding is finally finished for good.

“I think that went pretty well, all things considered,” Donna says, rolling over to look at Cameron.

Cam nods. “It was better than my worst nightmares, that’s for sure.”

Donna smiles at her. “I think it helped a lot that they both really love you.”

Cameron thinks about that. “It’s still . . . a really weird situation. I just hope that they’re as ok as they seemed tonight after they have time to process it a little bit.”

“I think they will be,” Donna answers. They fall into silence, and Cameron wonders whether Donna wants to ask her about the conversation with Joanie.

“So . . . I guess we should figure out how we’re going to tell Diane and Bos, right?” Cameron can’t decide whether that conversation will be easier or more difficult than the one they’ve just had with Joanie and Haley.

“Yeah. Maybe we should have them over for dinner next weekend?” Donna sound dubious, and Cameron knows exactly how she feels.

“Does it have to be dinner? I mean, it’s hard to get through a meal with something like that looming.” Cameron wishes that they could just drop the knowledge into their brains with some sort of mind-control device and not have to talk about it ever again, but that’s clearly not possible.

“Well, I think we have to feed them if we’re going to shock the daylights out of them, don’t you?” Donna is, as always, ever the hostess.

“How about just drinks and, you know, cheese? It’ll be faster, and they’ll have alcohol to get through it.” Cameron decides that, in fact, she’s actually more nervous about the prospect of talking to Bos and Diane than she was about Haley and Joanie.

Donna puts her head on Cameron’s chest and sighs. “Ok, drinks sound fine.”

 

**§§§**

Donna tells Diane and Bos pretty early into the cocktail hour, before they’ve all even finished their first drink. Her tone is calm, and she manages to say “Cameron and I are a couple now” ( _A couple of what?_ Cameron quips nervously to herself as she looks at Bos and tries to figure out what he might be thinking) without stumbling or even acting as though what she’s saying is any bigger deal than telling them about their new coding hires at Phoenix. Cam is amazed at her aplomb, but she figures that, for Donna anyway, getting through the Haley-and-Joanie conversation was much more difficult than any subsequent talk could ever be.

Initially, Cameron is more aware of Diane’s reaction than she is of Bos’s. Diane doesn’t look surprised, which Cameron finds a little strange. But she does look—what? Somber, maybe, and certainly not entirely happy even as she’s clearly trying to rearrange her face in order to make it appear as though she were. Cam suddenly recalls her first encounter with Donna’s judging, disapproving eyes, way, way back when she first started working at Cardiff. Donna’s eyes then had nothing over Diane’s right now.

To escape whatever is lying behind those eyes, Cam shifts her focus from Diane to Bos. Amazingly, she sees him looking at her warmly, with no judgment or bewilderment or anything else that she might have expected from him.

“So what’s the proper thing to say here? Congratulations? Best wishes?” Bos is grinning at both of them.

Donna laughs. “I think ‘I’m happy for you’ will do fine.”

“I like the sound of that. I _am_ happy for both of you. It’s nothing I ever could have thought of, but something about it feels right.” Bos is still smiling, and Cameron breathes a sigh of relief. She can admit to herself now how afraid she had been that Bos would have a real problem with this whole thing, and how sick that would have made her feel. The fact that he is so quick to accept the idea of her being with Donna makes Cam’s chest hurt. Not for the first time, Cam reflects on just how lucky she is to have Bos in her life.

Everyone seems to become aware at the same time that Diane has yet to say anything at all. Apparently conscious of the fact that all eyes in the room have suddenly shifted to her, Diane produces a smile that looks only a little forced. “I’m happy for you both too, of course. I’m glad you feel comfortable telling us.”

“Well, if we can’t tell people in the Bay area in 1996, there’s no hope for anything,” Donna says, sounding cooler and more collected than Cameron suspects she actually is. Donna, she thinks, must certainly have picked up on the oddness of Diane’s reaction. She’s sure of it when she sees Donna looking steadily at Diane, almost challenging her.

Diane smiles again, and this time her smile looks a fraction more genuine than it had before. “True. I’m glad you’re not in Texas anymore, for a lot of reasons.”

Donna, looking relieved, suddenly appears to notice that drinks need refreshing across the board. “I have a Cabernet that I’ve been saving. Why don’t I crack it open? We probably could all use it right about now.”

Everyone agrees enthusiastically, and Cam goes to fetch the bottle, glad for the chance to escape the room for a minute or two. She’s pretty sure that Bos will want to talk to her more about this when they’re alone, and she imagines that Diane might also have things to say to Donna. But for now, everything is about as stable as it can possibly be.

 

**§§§**

That night, Cameron finds that she can’t fall asleep. She listens to Donna’s slow, even breathing next to her and glances at the glowing alarm clock. 4:07 AM, which means that it’s 7:07 AM on the east coast. She sighs, knowing that there’s one more person that she wants to talk to about Donna, and that he’s undoubtedly up right now, getting ready to start his day.

Cameron gets out of bed quietly, goes into the living room, and picks up the phone. She hesitates for a moment, staring at it, but then finds herself dialing Joe’s number in Armonk. He answers on the second ring.

“Hello?”

Cam’s throat closes a little at the sound of his voice. “Hey. It’s . . . me.” She wonders if they’re still on “it’s me” terms after not seeing each other for more than a year.

From the warmth in Joe’s voice, she guesses that they still are. “Cam. These early-morning calls are getting to be a thing, aren’t they?”

Cameron swallows before answering. “Yeah.” She lets her end of this conversation trail off into silence, wondering how she is going to fill it with what she needs to tell him.

She hears Joe’s soft huff on the other end of the telephone line. “Is anything wrong Cam? I haven’t heard from you since your last email a couple of months ago. I was . . . well, I want us to keep being in each other’s lives, if we can.”

Something about Joe’s tone and what he says makes Cameron melt a little inside. Like Bos, he’s so much a part of who she has become that _not_ telling him about Donna would feel like a betrayal to everyone, including her. “Nothing’s wrong. I’ve just been . . . well, I do sort of have something to tell you.”

Cam feels Joe’s smile, pictures it in her mind’s eye as he answers. “I’m right here.”

Cam takes a deep breath. Here it comes. “So, I’m not sure what you’re going to think about this, but, well . . . Donna and I are kind of . . . well, dating.” She closes her eyes, glad that she doesn’t have to see Joe’s face as he absorbs this news.

Joe doesn’t say anything at all for a moment or two, and Cameron tries to imagine what might be going through his head. When he does speak, he responds with a question. “Are you happy?”

Cameron doesn’t have to think for a second about her answer to that one. “Yeah. I’m really happy. I . . . I can’t believe how happy I am.”

“Good.” Joes hesitates, and Cameron braces herself for whatever other questions he might want to ask her.

Cam offers him a little bit of help. “I’m sure that you think this is totally out of the blue and weird. It was . . . unexpected.”

“Actually, I’ve been suspecting it for awhile, ever since you called me up a few months ago. It just seemed to me that something might be on the brink of happening.” Joe’s voice is quiet and even; his words, devoid of any sort of emotion, make Cameron nervous.

“Joe . . . I hope . . . I hope you’re happy, too.” It sounds lame, and Cameron knows that she certainly didn’t leave Joe to start something with Donna—Donna, with whom Joe has had a strained relationship at best. But somehow, for some reason, she feels guilty as hell right now.

“I’m happy. Things with Brian are . . . pretty good. But Cam . . . I want you to be careful. I don’t want you to get hurt.” It comes out as more of a command than a bit of loving advice, and for some reason it irritates Cameron.

“Who says I’m going to get hurt? Anyway, it’s not as though that’s something that we can control. It’s not up to us.” Cameron thinks about how much pain she and Joe have caused each other over the years, and she wonders if Joe is thinking about that, too.

“Donna hurt you more than anyone possibly could. I’m not saying that she hasn’t changed, and I’m glad you think you’re happy. But I just think you should . . . keep it in mind. Go slow.” Joe’s voice is softer, kinder, and Cameron’s irritation dissipates a fraction.

“I hurt her, too.” It’s all Cameron can think of as a response, because _I trust her_ sounds too personal, and she doesn’t want to listen to Joe’s response to that.

“All the more reason that you should be careful, both of you. I know that ‘be careful’ is impossible advice if you think you’re in love, but it’s advice I want you to think about, anyway.” Joe sounds serious, but Cameron’s irritation is back full throttle. Is anyone harshing his Brian mellow with “be careful” and “go slow”? She doubts it.

“Ok, I’ll think about it. We’re taking it one day at a time.” That was sort of true, Cameron thinks, but “one day at a time” doesn’t necessarily mean “slowly.”

“Cam,” says Joe, apparently shifting the subject, “Brian is going to a conference in San Francisco in a few weeks.”

“Latin teachers have conferences?” She wonders what a Latin teacher conference would be like. Do they conjugate verbs and decline nouns at each other?

“This one is about the Advanced Placement Latin exam—a committee of Latin teachers and the College Board are trying to get more minority students to take classical languages. Brian is on that committee.” Joe sounds a little proud, which Cameron can’t help finding endearing.

Cameron suddenly has an inkling of why Joe is telling her about this. “So you’re going with him?”

“I thought I might. I’d like to see you and Haley. What do you think about it?” Joe sounds hesitant, and Cameron can’t quite decide what she does, in fact, think about it. She wonders how Donna would feel about seeing Joe, especially now that she and Cameron are a couple.

“I’d . . . I’d be ok with that, and I know that Haley would love it.” That’s true, Cam realizes—she _does_ want to see Joe, awkward and peculiar as it might be. She doesn’t want him to vanish out of her life; they’ve been through too much together for her to allow that to happen without some sort of effort to deter it.

“Good. I’ll email you the details. I’ll be there for Haley’s birthday.” Joe sounds a little wistful, and Cameron knows that he’s picturing the joy on Gordon’s face when they all celebrated Haley’s birthday by launching the model rockets on her land almost two years ago. She sighs to herself; sometimes she thinks that she’s never going to stop missing Gordon, no matter how much time passes.

After they hang up, Cameron creeps back into bed. Donna is still sleeping, and Cameron touches her cheek softly, thinking about the strange fact that the people most important to them now know that she and Donna are . . . what they are to each other. There’s something simultaneously really scary and really freeing about that, and Cameron doesn’t want to think about what it all might mean, not right now, anyway. She lies down, pulls Donna close to her, and shuts her eyes, matching Donna’s breathing until she herself is asleep as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm also relieved that everyone knows now--you have no idea how difficult it's been to find plausible reasons to kick Haley out of the house! :-)
> 
> So, we've now reached the every-two-weeks-update-summer-schedule that I talked about earlier. Between now and August 20, I'll be updating every two weeks, rather than every week. In other words, I'll be updating on July 16, July 30, August 13, and August 20. After that, updates will be returning to a weekly schedule. This is mostly because of dates that I have in mind for the end of the story, and I'll also be glad to have a little more time to focus on the writing itself. Thanks, as always, for hanging in there with me!


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Joe visits.

On the morning of Joe’s visit, which also happens to be Haley’s seventeenth birthday, Donna wakes up thinking about the past. She’s been doing that a lot lately, ever since Cameron told her that Joe would be in San Francisco this week.

 _Jesus Christ! You won, ok? You won. You got Haley! And Gordon! And Cam! You got_ everybody _._

But he didn’t, Donna thinks, glancing at Cameron sleeping beside her. Or rather, he did for awhile, but he didn’t forever. Still, the unpleasant sense of foreboding that flashes through her is impossible to ignore.

As if she feels it as well, Cam’s eyes suddenly open. Watching her re-entering the world, Donna can’t help smiling. “Hey.”

Cam sits up a little groggily, and Donna notices that she looks a lot tenser than she usually does first thing in the morning, before her busy mind has time to start its usual race around the daily tracks of life. Donna decides that, however she’s feeling herself, right now it’s her job to be the supportive one, rather than to give in to the irrational doubts and anxieties that insist on plaguing her. “You doing ok? It might be kind of a weird dinner tonight.”

Cam looks a little relieved, probably because Donna isn’t pretending that seeing Joe will be no big deal for either of them. “I’m ok. I mean, I’m . . . ambivalent. I don’t exactly know how I’m feeling, to tell the truth. I thought I wanted to see Joe again, but now . . .” She swallows a little, and Donna takes her hand.

“It’s going to be good. You never really got closure, and now you can move forward into whatever you and Joe are going to become.” Donna’s words sound mature and calm, but she feels her heart pounding a little as she utters them. She hopes that closure is actually what’s going to happen. She’s being ridiculous, she knows that; it’s been over between Cam and Joe for a long time, and Cam has never given her the slightest indication that she has any lingering doubts or regrets. Still, though . . . still, there are some couples that just keep circling each other forever, regardless of what either of them might think about it. In spite of herself, Donna wonders if it can ever truly be genuinely _over_ between Cameron and Joe, if they’rereally capable of moving on and making a life with other people.

Donna slowly becomes aware that Cameron is studying her. From Cameron’s expression, she knows that Cam has cut through Donna’s surface calm to the turmoil lying beneath, and Donna is suddenly embarrassed. Then Cameron kisses her, leaning against her with a sigh. Cam doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t really have to.

 

**§§§**

Donna is quiet at breakfast, letting Haley and Cameron’s conversation wash over her.

“What do you know about Brian?” Haley is putting sugar on her Cheerios as she talks.

Cameron shrugs. “Not any more than you do. He’s a Latin teacher in Joe’s school, and I think they’ve been together for awhile.” Donna notes with a twinge of relief that, unless Cam is a better actor than Donna believes her to be, she doesn’t seem particularly upset when she says that.

Haley looks as though she’d like to pursue this further, but then she appears to think better of it. “What time are they coming tonight?”

Cam shrugs again. “Five-ish, he said. Brian has to finish his conference thing, and apparently it’s hard to predict when that’ll end.”

Haley smiles a little. “It’s going to be pretty cool to see Joe. I mean, we’ve emailed and written a couple of real letters, but it’s not the same.”

As always, Donna feels some complicated emotion between touched and threatened when she sees evidence of how close Joe and Haley have become. However she herself feels about Joe—and truly, she has no real idea _how_ she feels right now—she can’t help a twinge of warmth toward anyone who cares about her girls. She suddenly thinks about how Cameron always kept in touch with Joanie through those long years of estrangement from Donna. At the time, she hadn’t wanted to admit to herself just how much that meant to her, but she’s thinking about it now.

Donna suddenly realizes that Haley is talking to her. “What are we going to have for dinner?”

“Chili and rice. Bos’s chili, actually—he gave me the recipe.” Donna feels Cameron’s eyes on her, and she wonders if Cam is thinking about the last time they all ate that chili together, right after Gordon died. Joe had been barely holding it together that day, his love for Gordon and his bone-deep sadness palpable.

Haley smiles; she loves Bos’s chili, and Donna had known that it would be a perfectly acceptable birthday dinner for her. She had considered Chicken Marbella, which has always been one of her standard dinner party recipes. But something inside of her felt the need to guard that recipe jealously, saving it for the second anniversary of Gordon’s death, which is right around the corner. Last year’s Chicken Marbella might have been the first time she realized just how much Cameron cared about . . . everything, and Donna finds she doesn’t want to give away even a little piece of that feeling to Joe, not when she needs it so much for herself right now.

“You’re getting a cake, right?” Haley looks as though she doesn’t quite trust Donna to manage even the most basic of details, and Donna can’t really blame her. Between Cameron and Phoenix and Symphonic, there’s been little mental energy left for much of anything else.

“Hmm. A cake, you say? And why would we need a cake?” Donna suppresses a smile, attempting to maintain a bemused expression.

Haley tries to look sad, but then cracks up in spite of her best efforts. “It better be chocolate. Cake _and_ icing!”

“We’ll see,” Donna says, playing the role of tough negotiator. “After all, we need to save some dazzle for next year, when you’ll be eighteen. Seventeen is nothing.” But seventeen is _not_ nothing, she thinks to herself, looking at her smart, talented, beautiful daughter. Donna can hardly believe that this much time has passed already.

 

**§§§**

Joe and Brian arrive around 5:30. Joe is still Joe, a little greyer around the temples and somehow more dignified and professorial than Donna might have expected. He introduces Brian—slight, Asian American, steel-rimmed eyeglasses, kind expression—somewhat awkwardly.All of them seem relieved when Haley cracks a sudden joke.

“I don’t think there’s anything in that black bag for me,”Haley says, peering into Joe’s shopping bag as she quotes Dorothy in _The Wizard of Oz_. Everybody laughs, and Donna has never felt so glad that Haley has apparently picked up something from Jordan’s obsession with old movies.

Joe smiles at her, clearly amused. “You would be wrong.” He reaches into the bag and pulls out a small, attractively-wrapped package. “Happy birthday, Haley.”

Haley grins at him as she unwraps it. Inside is a small leather bracelet with a blazing comet carved in its side. She stares at it, then at Joe.

Joe looks a little embarrassed. “I thought . . . it would be nice to have something to remember it. I think about Comet a lot.”

Haley steps toward Joe and gives him a hug. “So do I. Thank you. Really. It’s perfect.” She slips it on her wrist. Donna is moved by Joe’s thoughtfulness; she sees just how much that bracelet means to Haley, even though all of her memories of Comet are not perfectly happy ones. But then, she reflects, are memories of anything ever perfectly happy?

 

**§§§**

By the time they sit down at the table, all of them are more relaxed, and conversation flows more freely. Donna tries hard not to keep stealing glances at Cameron, even though she would like to study every nuance of her expressions in order to understand what might be going on in her head right now.

Donna shifts her attention to Brian, who might reasonably be feeling a little out of place as the only one in the room without a complicated history. “Brian, is this your first trip to San Francisco?”

Brian swallows, shakes his head, and takes a sip of water. “Actually, no. I lived in California for awhile about ten years ago. I taught at a private school in Claremont. That’s near LA, but I travelled through the state as much as I could.”

“We’re actually headed down to LA at the end of the week, to visit with a few of Brian’s friends,” says Joe, looking fondly at the man sitting beside him. They do seem happy, Donna thinks. They’re certainly acting like a couple.

Haley interrupts to ask Joe and Brian about the classes they’re teaching, and soon anecdotes about teenagers are flying around the room. Donna allows herself a glance at Cameron and sees that she is sitting quietly, focused on Joe with a concentrated, almost puzzled expression. Donna can certainly understand that: Joe is himself, but somehow also different, more grounded, more philosophical. He seems, Donna thinks, to have found where he wants to be and no longer is searching for the next thing over the horizon. She wonders what it would be like to think that the world is exactly enough, that nothing else will ever be needed. No matter how happy she’s ever been—no matter how happy she feels right now—she doesn’t remember ever really believing that she can stop chasing the future.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to wear a school uniform, “ Cameron says, joining into the conversation. “I mean, who could possibly learn anything dressed like a dork?”

Joe gives Cam a look so affectionate that it unnerves Donna a little. “I guess ‘Ignore Alien Orders’ t-shirts are a lot more conducive to an effective educational experience?”

“Damn right,” Cameron grins, and everyone laughs. Donna thinks about that t-shirt, which happened to be exactly what Cameron had been wearing the day Donna rescued her code at Cardiff thirteen years ago. Code, she recalls, that Joe himself had actually deleted as a publicity stunt. Cameron, barely more than a scared college kid despite how valiantly she attempted to hide it, had been devastated, and Donna still can’t quite believe that Joe did that to her.

 _Not,_ she admits to herself, _that I haven’t done terrible things to Cameron in the name of business myself_.

Talk drifts to Haley’s coding classes and her relationship with Jordan, and Donna can see how interested Joe is in everything that Haley has to say. “You know,” he says carefully, looking at Haley a bit wistfully, “your dad would have been incredibly proud to see the person that you’re becoming.”

Mentioning Gordon turns the room quiet for a moment, but it feels like a good silence, one grounded in a shared love and not in sadness. Donna suddenly feels Cameron’s hand in hers, a moment of open contact and affection that means everything to her. Joe smiles at the two of them, and Donna is unexpectedly fighting tears.

Joe clears his throat. “Anyway, if it counts for anything, I’m proud of you, too.” Donna can hear how much he means that, and she sees that Haley can as well.

“It, um, it counts for a lot,” Haley says, flushing a little. “Thanks.” She hesitates, and then continues. “I sometimes wonder what he would have thought about . . . everything.” Donna’s heart breaks a little. No matter how many times she’s told Haley how sure she is that Gordon would have loved and accepted everything about her, she sees that Haley can’t quite believe that with absolute confidence.

Cameron glances at Donna, and then turns to Haley. “Haley, I can promise you one thing—your dad saw you. He knew who you were, and he loved everything about you. There’s just no question about it.” The flash of sadness on Cameron’s face makes Donna think that she must be thinking about her own father as well as about Gordon.

Joe nods, looking pensive. “I can promise you that, too. In fact, I know it as an absolute truth.” He doesn’t say anything else, but Haley appears more convinced than Donna has ever seen her looking before. She thanks Joe with her eyes, and he nods in understanding. For some reason, Donna recalls the night Joe came to dinner way back when he and Gordon first started working together, the night Gordon was late coming home during a hurricane.

_You afraid of the hurricane? But you’ve got hurricane zappers right here. You don’t know about hurricane zappers? You just point ‘em up at the storm and then it can’t hurt you. Here, I’m telling you the truth. Give it a shot._

Donna remembers watching Joanie and Haley’s fears fade away, remembers seeing Joe in a slightly different light. And now, so many years later, Joe is still providing Haley with a hurricane zapper. _He really is wonderful with the girls,_ she thinks now. _He always has been._

 

**§§§**

After dinner and before dessert, Donna clears the table, Haley goes to her bedroom to do something on the computer, and Joe excuses himself to sit by the pool. After a few minutes, Donna sees Cameron slip outside and sit down next to him, leaving Donna alone with Brian. She follows his gaze out the window to Cameron and Joe, who appear to be deep in a conversation.

Brian looks at Donna and smiles. “I think they have some things that they need to say to each other.” His voice is casual and unworried.

“I think so too,” Donna says, hoping that she’s managing to match Brian’s tone. She wonders just how much Brian knows about Joe and Cameron’s backstory.

“When Joe first came to Hanson, he was pretty hard to get to know. It seemed as though all he cared about were the kids that he was teaching—he didn’t seem to have any interest in the faculty. Just about everyone accepted that and left him alone.” Brian has shifted his eyes from the window and is looking Donna directly now.

“But you didn’t,” Donna smiles. She finds herself liking Brian quite a bit.

“Nope, I didn’t. There was something about Joe that just . . . well, he’s not like most other people.” Brian’s expression is soft, and Donna knows exactly what he’s feeling right now; it’s written all over his face.

“I first met Joe in 1983, and he really became my husband’s best friend. Gordon’s death hit Joe really hard. I’m glad to see that he’s in a better place right now.” Donna means that sincerely. However complicated some of her feelings about Joe might be, she genuinely wants him to be happy.

Brian looks at her. “Joe’s talked to me a lot about Gordon and Haley, and a lot about Cameron, too.” He glances out the window again, and Donna follows the path tracked by his eyes.

“I think Cameron has been pretty nervous about seeing Joe again.” Donna isn’t quite sure why she’s telling Brian this, but there’s something about him, something kind and accepting, that makes her want to open up a little.

Brian looks at her and nods. “Joe has been nervous, too. I hope they can get past whatever unfinished business they still have left with each other. Joe really needs to have Cameron in his life; he’s never going to stop loving her, and it’s hard to love someone that you never see.”

Donna’s head jerks involuntarily at “he’s never going to stop loving her,” but Brian sounds so matter-of-fact that her anxiety calms before it has a chance to smother her. Still, he apparently notices that flash of fear and smiles at her.

“You don’t have to worry about the two of them, at least where Joe is concerned. He knows that it’s over. There are all different kinds of love.” Brian doesn’t say anything else, but Donna is grateful to him for mentioning the looming relationship elephant directly. After all, she’d rather not be a jealous, insecure mess unless she absolutely has to.

 

**§§§**

After thechocolate/chocolate birthday cake (which apparently meets Haley’s exacting standards), Joe offers to help Donna clean up . She feels Cameron’s eyes on the two of them as they disappear into the kitchen.

Donna busies herself with rinsing off the plates, not exactly sure what to say to Joe now that the two of them are alone. Somewhat to her relief, Joe is the one to break the silence.

“Donna, I just wanted to say . . . I’m glad for you and Cam. At first I was a little . . . well, I’m not that anymore. She seems really happy, happier than I’ve ever seen her, actually. It makes me realize that she . . . wasn’t that way when she was with me.” He sounds a little melancholy, and Donna suddenly wants to reach out to him. She settles on a quick touch to his shoulder; Joe looks at her, swallows, and smiles fleetingly.

“Thanks, Joe. I . . . I appreciate your saying that.” In the back of her mind, Donna marvels at how radically life can change. Five years ago, the idea that she would be standing here with Joe, feeling this way about Cameron, would have been absolutely inconceivable to her.

Joe nods. “The thing is, Donna . . . we love some of the same people. I don’t know what we are to each other, or what we’re going to be. But that makes us sort of . . .”

“Family,” Donna finishes. “It makes us family.” And with a shock, she realizes how true that is. Joe is at the center of these unexpected connections that have been forged over the past thirteen years. For better or for worse, they’re part of each other’s lives for good now.

Donna and Joe regard each other, a flash of something warm passing from one to the other. Joe hesitates for a moment before speaking again. “Donna . . . take care of Cam. She’s a lot more fragile than she seems. I don’t think I did a very good job with that.”

Donna looks at him. “I want to. I just . . . Cam’s not really great about talking about the hard stuff, not yet anyway.” She wonders why she just confessed that to Joe. She’s never said it out loud to anyone, how she knows that there is a deep, buried layer of pain in Cameron that she rarely even hints at, let alone discusses outright.

Joe nods a little sadly. “I know. None of us is great at that, not really. But I hope it’ll come with the two of you in time, because she needs it.” He sighs and doesn’t say anything else. They both go back to rinsing, with Donna’s mind and heart too full of Cameron for her to say anything either.

 

**§§§**

Cameron is quiet that night as they lie in the darkness. Donna runs her fingers through Cam’s hair, and Cameron nestles into Donna with a sigh. Donna wonders what Cam is thinking about.

“I liked Brian,” Cam finally says. “I think he’s good for Joe. He’s . . . less screwed up than I am. Joe needs that.”

Donna puts her arms around Cameron and pulls her close. “Yeah, I liked him, too.”

“We ended up in a pretty good place, I think. I’m glad he came.” Cam traces the back of Donna’s neck with her fingers.

“That’s good.” Donna suddenly feels very, very drowsy as the strain of the day begins to catch up with her.

Just as Donna is starting to drift off to sleep, Cameron speaks again. “It was good that Joe told Haley that Gordon would have been . . . ok with everything. I think that was really important to her to hear.”

That wakes Donna up. “It was, and you were great about telling her that, too.” She takes Cam’s hand, thinking how lucky she is to have people in her life who genuinely love and care about her daughters. It makes doing all this alone, without Gordon, a lot more bearable.

Much later, after Donna has been asleep for awhile, she wakes suddenly. She realizes that Cameron must be having some sort of dream; Cam is saying something almost inaudibly in her sleep and thrashing a little. Suddenly, her eyes fly open and she stares at Donna in confusion. Donna draws her close. “Are you ok?” Feeling Cameron trembling a little, she strokes Cam’s cheek.

Cameron nods and puts her head on Donna’s shoulder, clearly trying to steady herself. Donna wonders if Cam’s dream had been about Joe, but shedoesn’t ask. She thinks back to her conversation with Joe in the kitchen and embraces Cameron even more tightly. Only when she feels Cam finally relaxing into sleep does she allow herself to do the same, arms still around her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there are a couple of shoutouts in this chapter. First of all, I had Brian teach at a private school in Claremont, California because Chris Cantwell's wife teaches humanities at [The Webb Schools](https://www.webb.org) there. I assume that her career was the inspiration for Joe's final landing point, and she seems like a really cool person (she's a poet as well as a teacher). I like giving shoutouts to people who will almost certainly never find this fic!
> 
> Shoutout #2 has to do with the bracelet that Joe gave Haley. In the shooting scripts, one of the deleted scenes from 4.06 ("A Connection Is Made") has Joe giving Haley the bracelet as a birthday present:
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> It's not Haley's fault that the scene had to be cut for time, and I wanted her to get her present! :-)


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron dreams and remembers.

At first, Cameron isn’t able to recall anything about the dream when she wakes up from it; in fact, she can never even be sure that she’s had a dream at all.All she really knows for certain is that, ever since Haley’s birthday dinner with Joe last week, once or twice a night she’s been startled out of sleep, unsettled and disoriented, sometimes shaking a little, with no idea how she got that way. She can tell that Donna is noticing, although neither of them says anything about it. When it happens, Donna pulls Cameron close, or kisses the back of her neck, or brushes the hair from her forehead. That helps, and Cam is usually able to fall asleep again relatively quickly. But whatever Cameron is dreaming usually is back the next night, no matter how many times, or how patiently, Donna tries to soothe it away.

Cameron’s go-to coping mechanism for anything wrong in her life has always been straightforward: she ignores whatever it might be and throws herself into work. Luckily, she doesn’t have any shortage of work right now: she and Donna have hired five new coders in the past month, bringing the total number of full time staff working on MusicLand to twelve, not counting the two of them. Now that Phoenix has officially outgrown cycling among Donna’s dining room table, unused Symphonic conference rooms, and the Airstream workspace, the coding team is working out of the old Mutiny building. Donna and Cameron had both hesitated a little at that decision, wondering if they could ever both sit in its conference room again, if what went wrong at Mutiny might somehow haunt this good new thing that they’re building together. In the end, however, they couldn’t resist the pull of the place, and looking at the busy beehive of coders, Cameron is glad that they couldn’t.

Keeping tabs on everyone, making sure that they’re implementing her design visions appropriately, has become a big chunk of Cameron’s job. This morning, she’s thinking about calling an impromptu meeting to discuss some enhancements to playlists that she thinks are really critical when she hears the door creaking open. Turning, she sees Donna entering, looking a little breathless. Cameron is surprised to see her—Donna usually can’t manage to get away from Symphonic to come to Phoenix, which is why she and Cam still have their midday meeting-at-Symphonic time—and then extremely happy. They grin at each other.

“Hey,” Cam says, walking over to Donna. “Anything up?”

Donna shakes her head. “I just wanted to see how everyone was doing. I thought maybe we could talk to the coders together, and then you and I could go out to lunch. Do you have time for that?”

“Well, lunch time is Phoenix time, so yeah.” Lunch with Donna sounds great, Cam thinks. They haven’t seemed to have as much time for each other this week as they usually do. There’s been a nagging _something_ in the air ever since that dinner with Joe, and Cam wants to _whoosh_ whatever that something is out of existence.

It takes a little while to quiet the chatter among the coders enough for them to realize that they’re supposed to be paying attention to their bosses. Cameron watches them kid each other and listens to their banter as Donna tries to get their attention. It’s a lot like the way it used to be at Mutiny, Cameron thinks, but entirely different at the same time. She gropes to explain all that to Donna later over their sushi lunch.

“I just feel, I don’t know, _different_ from them, you know? At Mutiny, even though I was sort of in charge there, too, it felt like all of us doing the same thing together. Here, it just seems like . . . there’s them, and there’s me, but we’re not all the same anymore. It’s weird.” Cam takes a bite of her salmon sushi, thinking for a moment about how different sushi in Japan tasted than it does here. She shakes her head at herself. Where is all of this strange nostalgia coming from all of a sudden?

Donna’s expression is somewhat wry. “Well, you’re older now, Cam; you’re not twenty-two anymore. There’s a big difference between twenty-two and thirty-four. You _are_ different from them, and it’s ok that you are.”

Cam considers this. “Huh. I never thought about it like that before.”

Donna shrugs. “It was like that for me at Mutiny, you know; I felt—hell, I _was_ —a lot older than the rest of you, and sometimes it was rough. I always felt like an outsider, and I hated having to be the mom all the time.”

“Well, I don’t feel like I’m the mom, just like I’m . . . more of a boss than I used to be, I guess. It’s fine.” Cam wonders if it _is_ fine, but there’s nothing much she can do about it. They need coders, and the coders need someone to coordinate everything. It can’t just be herself and Donna doing everything together in a perfect, solitary bubble, much as she would like that to continue. She’s quiet for a moment, thinking about how hard it is to keep things from changing.

Donna looks at her. “Hey, are you ok? You’ve seemed . . . I don’t know, tired this week.” Donna is trying to sound casual, but Cam can tell that she’s worked up to asking this question, and that she’s genuinely concerned.

Cam hesitates. “I guess I am, a little. I haven’t been sleeping great.” As she says this, she realizes how true it is. Waking up a couple of times a night might be taking more out of her than she thought.

“Let’s take it easy this weekend, can’t we? We should hang out, watch movies, and just relax. I think we both need that. We don’t need to work this weekend; we’re totally on schedule right now.” Donna still looks worried about her, and a wave of something soft floods over Cameron.

“Yeah, let’s do that. That sounds really good.” And it does sound good, Cam thinks as she pops a piece of California roll into her mouth. It sounds like just the thing she needs to get back into a better headspace.

 

**§§§**

The weekend is indeed wonderful: Cam and Donna watch all of the old Star Trek movies on Saturday (Cam can tell that Donna is shocked when she confesses that Star Trek IV is really her favorite—she’s always had a thing for whales) and hike and picnic at the Airstream on Sunday. The maybe-dream doesn’t plague her all weekend, and she thinks that whatever it was has finally passed. Cam lies contentedly in the dark on Sunday night, listening to Donna’s soft, even breathing, and soon falls into a deep sleep herself. Everything, she thinks drowsily to herself, is back to normal.

Until the next night, when it isn’t.

_She’s in the back seat of her family’s old Chevy, which means she had to be about five years old. Her parents are talking to each other, but she can’t make out what they’re saying. They’re arguing, she knows that, and she also knows that she’s confused and upset._

Cameron wakes up with a gasp that she tries to swallow, now knowing definitively that this thing is a dream, but still having no real idea what’s she’s dreaming about or what it could mean. This time Donna doesn’t stir, and Cam is glad about that—she doesn’t want Donna to think she’s becoming a basket case, even if having Donna’s arms around her is exactly what she wants right now. She carefully nestles in a little closer, trying not to wake Donna up as she does that, waiting for the pounding of her heart to subside. After awhile, it eventually does, and after an even longer while, Cameron is finally able to fall asleep once again.

 

**§§§**

Without really having to discuss it, Donna and Cameron decide to recreate the Chicken Marbella dinner from last year for the second anniversary of Gordon’s death. Donna wants to take the day off from work so she and Cam can shop and cook together, and Cameron doesn’t argue about it: she’s still really beat, and having to cook a meal by herself seems like an insurmountable challenge right now. Doing it with Donna, on the other hand, sounds actually fun.

“Do we still want to have a coconut custard pie for dessert, even though Joanie won’t be here this year?” Donna looks a little wistful as she asks this.

Cam nods. “Definitely. We should have the bagel bites, and the Chicken Marbella and rice, and the pie. That’s our tradition.” She feels a little funny as she says the word, wondering if the permanence that it implies is actually real.

Donna’s wistfulness appears to lift, and she smiles at Cam. “I guess it is.We also need the cornichons, bologna, and mayonnaise. That’s our tradition, too.”

Cam feels one of those flashes of warmth that she sometimes gets when she thinks about what it’s like to be part of this family. “It was pretty great when Joanie and Haley made those for me last year. I . . . I really appreciated it.”

Donna kisses her as a response. Cam closes her eyes, feeling grateful for everything and for nothing at all. Who cares about a stupid dream, anyway?

 

**§§§**

Shopping and preparing dinner on the second anniversary of Gordon’s death goes smoothly; Cameron realizes that her cooking skills have improved quite a bit over the past year, and, as they usually do with any project, she and Donna work efficiently and harmoniously together. The food turns out great—Cam has forgotten just how good Chicken Marbella actually is—and the three of them spend more time recalling funny stories about Gordon than they do actively feeling his loss. She particularly loves seeing Haley this year, so different from the way she had been before coming out, before Jordan. _Everything_ , Cam thinks, listening to Haley crack a joke and watching Donna laugh in response, _is so much better now._

“The funny thing is, I don’t think Dad was even into capers all that much. He just kept forgetting that he’d already bought them.” Haley picks a caper off of her plate and regards is suspiciously.

Cam grins. “I’ve gotten to really like them. I actually sprinkled some on top of the mayonnaise for my cornichon wrap.”

Haley makes a face. “That’s totally gross.”

“Nope,” Cam says. “It was really good. In fact, I think I’ll make it for dinner the next time you have Jordan over.”

Just as Haley snorts and tosses a crumbled napkin at her, the phone rings. It’s Joanie, and all of them talk to her through mouthfuls of coconut custard pie, which they tease her about not being here to eat. Cam, looking at Donna’s glowing face, knows how much this call means to her, and she’s really proud of the much-less-dickish-than-she-used-to-be person that Joanie is becoming.

Later, after the dishes are done and Donna is frowning over a proposal from a new startup that will be pitching to Symphonic tomorrow, Cam goes outside to sit by the pool. Suddenly sleepy, she closes her eyes for what she tells herself will be just a second or two. She’s not quite sure when she actually falls asleep, but she jerks a little when she hears someone settling into the lounge chair next to her.

“Sorry,” Haley says, sounding awkward. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Cam shakes her head, both to communicate to Haley and clear the cobwebs from her brain. “You didn’t. I was just sort of resting my eyes.”

Haley grins at her. “Ok. Anyway, thanks for the dinner tonight. I kind of hope we do this every year.”

“Yeah, me too.” Cam is a little touched at how much the whole thing seems to mean to Haley.

“Hey, Cam? Can I ask you something?” Haley sounds more hesitant than usual.

“Go for it,” Cam says, regarding Haley fondly.

“Do you ever stop thinking about your father? I mean, like, I know you can’t think about him every single minute, but do you . . . I don’t really know what I’m asking.” Haley trails off, sounding embarrassed.

Cameron bites her lip. “No, I know what you mean. I think he’s always there, sort of under everything else I do, you know? And yeah, there are long stretches of time when I’m not consciously thinking about him at all, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in my head.”

Haley sighs. “Thanks. I know you were a lot younger than I was when your father died. I was just wondering what it was like for you. I mean, I know it’s not really my business, but . . .”

Cam interrupts her. “Haley, you can always ask me whatever you want about this stuff. It’s . . . it’s ok, really.” Cameron thinks about what she has just said. Talking about her father is never easy, but she wishes she had someone who understood some of how it was when she was Haley’s age. If she can, she wants to be that person for Haley now.

Haley smiles a little. “It really helps me that you and Joe actually liked my dad. I mean, I know that my mom loved him, even after the divorce. But it’s different with other people like you guys.”

Cam nods. “Yeah, I get it.” She realizes that she never had that herself, with her own father: he didn’t really have friends who could tell her about him, beyond what she heard from her mother. Suddenly, keenly, she wishes that she knew more about him.

Haley goes inside to do some homework, leaving Cameron alone with her thoughts beside the pool. After awhile, listening to steady hum of the pool filter, she starts to nod off once again.

_She’s in the car again, but this time she can hear her parents clearly._

_“So now, the whole damn day is wrecked,” her mother is saying. “Is that what you wanted?”_

_Her father doesn’t answer for a minute, and when he finally speaks, his voice is angry. “What the hell did you expect me to do?”_

_“Not drag us out of there just after we’d gotten set up.” Her mother sounds disgusted._

When Cameron jerks out of sleep, she feels even shakier than usual.

 

**§§§**

A few mornings later, Cameron wakes up thinking about Bos; with one thing or another, they haven’t been alone together since she first told him about herself and Donna. With a pang, she realizes how much she misses him. It’s time, she thinks, to pay him a visit.

She finds Bos outside his house, messing around in his new boat. Cam has been so distracted lately that she hadn’t even remembered that he had bought it.

Bos sees her before she’s reached the boat’s ladder. “Hey, stranger!”

Cam grins at him; as always, just seeing Bos makes her feel better. “Hey. She’s looking pretty awesome.” The boat is a little bigger and newer than the one he’d had to sell, and Cam can tell how pleased Bos is with it.

Bos smiles down at her from the boat’s deck. “Come aboard!”

Cameron climbs the ladder, jumps onto the deck, and sits on a side bench. After putting down his scraper, Bos joins her.

They sit quietly for a moment. Remembering again that they haven’t yet really talked about Donna, Cam suddenly feels awkward, wondering if Bos might be more uncomfortable with it than he had initially indicated. But almost before she has time to decide if she should bring it up herself, she hears Bos chuckle. “So. How’s it going with Donna?”

Cam studies him—all warmth, not a trace of discomfort or reproach anywhere. Her whole body relaxes as relief floods through it. “Good, really good. Great, actually. I mean . . . I know it must seem weird to you. It’s nothing that I ever could have imagined happening to me.”

Bos chuckles again. “Cameron, one thing I’ve learned about you in all of these years is that you’re not like anyone else, and nothing you ever do could surprise me. You and Donna have been through hell, separately and together. If this is where it's all finishing, I’m glad for you both.”

Cam feels a small prickling behind her eyes, and she doesn’t answer. God, she’s lucky that Bos is . . . Bos. Sometimes she thinks that nobody will ever accept her the way that he does, not even Donna. He’s really the closest thing she’ll ever have to a father.

When Cam sees Bos looking at her with a little concern and puzzlement, she realizes that she might have let too much time go by before responding. “Yeah. Thanks. I’m just . . .” She finds she can’t quite finish the sentence, and she’s not totally sure what she is trying to say.

Bos is studying her with his full attention. “Cameron? What’s goin’ on?”

Cam shrugs. “Nothing, really. It’s just . . . I’m sort of having a strange dream, and it’s messing me up a little.”

“What’s the dream?” Cameron almost hates to worry Bos like this, especially when this whole thing is most likely nothing at all.

“It’s . . . I don’t know, it’s kind of stupid. All I can tell is that I’m riding in the back seat of our old car when I was a kid, and my parents are arguing about something.” It sounds really lame as Cam tries to explain it.

“And nothing else?” Bos is frowning a little.

“Nope. Nothing else. I just wake up and feel . . . weird.” Cam thinks that “weird” doesn’t actually cover it. She wakes feeling scared and sick, for no reason that seems to have anything to do with the dream itself. It’s not as though listening to her parents argue is any big deal, or had been anything unusual in her childhood, for that matter.

“Huh. I’m not a dream doc, but in my experience, whatever that dream means will become clear soon enough. Just don’t fight it, if you can manage that.” Bos puts his hand on Cam’s shoulder, and she smiles at him. _Don’t fight_ _it_ sounds like as good advice as any other.

 

**§§§**

Friday morning at breakfast, Haley hesitantly asks Donna and Cam if they’d like to watch a video with her and Jordan that night.

“It’s that movie _Philadelphia_ that was out a few years ago. I never saw it, but Jordan thinks that it’s really important, and she rented it. It’s about this gay lawyer who dies of AIDS. Anyway, she thought that maybe you guys would like to see it, too.” Haley looks a little awkward as she rushes to explain.

Cam smiles to herself, wondering about how odd it must be for Haley to realize that her girlfriend actually _likes_ her mother, and Cameron too. _It’s great that Haley has such a cool first love. Most of us aren’t nearly that lucky._

Cam realizes that Donna is looking at her inquiringly, and Cameron shrugs and nods. Sure, a movie with the girls tonight would be fine. She hadn’t seen _Philadelphia_ when it first came out, mostly because she had been busy dealing with a marriage that was rapidly falling apart.

 

**§§§**

Donna makes lots of popcorn, and the four of them settle in for the movie that night after dinner. Cameron doesn’t really know what to expect; she doesn’t know much about _Philadelphia_ beyond the broad plot points that Haley had mentioned, and she has the general sense that it’s a preachy disease-of-the-week sort of thing, the kind of movie that she generally mocks without a second thought. She is, therefore, utterly caught off guard about how hard it hits her, or how emotionally draining it is for her to see the story of Andy Beckett, a Philadelphia lawyer fired from his firm because his partners discover that he has AIDS. Watching it, Cameron thinks for the first time about the fact that this whole . . . thing . . . is more than just about loving Donna. She’s never before considered that their relationship also means that they’re both now somehow part of a larger community, one that isn’t exactly thriving in the world, one that a lot of people seem to hate for no reason at all. Cam rarely cries at movies, but she tears up at the end of this one, after Andy dies looking into the eyes of his lover and home videos of him as a child flash across the screen right before the credits roll.

When the movie ends, all four of them are silent, and Cameron can see that Donna, Jordan, and Haley are also visibly moved. Haley is the first to say something.

“Do women . . . can women get HIV from sex too?” She’s not looking at any of them as she asks this. Cam tenses up a little, because she’s not really sure of the answer, either.

Donna puts an arm around her daughter. “Yes, they can. It’s not as high of a risk as it is for men, but it _is_ a risk.”

Haley nods and glances at Jordan. Cam wonders if they’ve had sex yet, if Haley would talk to Donna about it first, or if she’d be uncomfortable doing that. For the millionth time, she’s glad that she doesn’t have the responsibility of having kids herself. It’s one thing to love Haley and Joanie, to act as a friend/aunt/big sister to them. It’s quite another to have the official, unshruggable job of giving them the tools they need to get through life with their bodies and souls intact.

Cam’s mind turns to Joe, and she hears herself saying her thoughts out loud. “Joe had an HIV scare a few years ago, when we were still working together at Mutiny.”

Donna and Haley are both looking at her. “Really?” The look on Donna’s face is complex.

Cameron nods. “Yeah, and I think . . . I’m pretty sure that he had an old boyfriend who died of AIDS, even though Joe never really talked to me much about it.” She and Joe never really discussed any of that part of Joe’s life, she realizes now, wondering exactly why that was. She wishes now that she knew more about how it had been for Joe, and how it is now for him and Brian.

 

**§§§**

Cameron and Donna don’t say much to each other as they get ready for bed that night, and Cam assumes that Donna is also thinking about the movie. They’re lying together in the dark when Cam feels Donna’s arm around her, holding her tight.

Cam closes her eyes and breathes out slowly. “It’s not just that he died. I mean, that’s awful, it’s a terrible disease. But so many people hated him for no reason at all. I know it sounds naive, but I just thought that . . . we were beyond that, somehow.”

Donna puts her head into the crook of Cameron’s shoulder. “We’re in a kind of lucky little bubble here in the Bay area, aren’t we? Our friends are fine with us. We own our own business, so we don’t have to worry about what our employers think. It’s easy to forget that it’s not that way for everyone.” She falls silent.

Cam is quiet too, thinking about how much the world sucks for so many people so much of the time.

 

**§§§**

The dream is particularly vivid that night. Her parents’ voices in the front seat are louder and clearer, and the scenery whizzing by is more colorful and intense. For the first time, Cameron hears a line that she’s never been aware of in the dream before.

_“She doesn’t have to see that shit.” It’s her father hissing it to her mother, who doesn’t respond._

And suddenly, this time when Cameron jerks awake, she knows that it’s a memory and not really a dream at all.

_She’s driving with her parents to a park for a picnic, one that she has looked forward to all week. They almost never get to do things together as a family, and she can’t wait to eat the sandwiches her mother has packed and then see the animals in the zoo next to the park._

_Her mother puts their food on a picnic table and starts to pass out plates. She’s looking at the pitcher of pink lemonade when she hears her father say something._

_“Fucking faggots.”_

_She jerks around and sees two men sitting at the table next to them, laughing at something. One of them is holding the other’s hand._

_Suddenly, she hears her father telling her mother that they’re leaving. Her mother says something in protest, but he’s stuffing everything back into the basket. The lemonade pitcher spills, and she starts to cry as her father pushes her toward the car._

Cameron is trembling again, and she finally knows why she is.

Donna wakes up this time, concern quickly replacing the fuzziness of sleep. “Cam? Are you ok?”

Cameron nods, not looking at her, trying to push the memory away, to bury it back where it belongs. Could this actually be a memory, and not some weird insertion from the movie into her subconscious? Was that really her father? Her father, who loved everything about her, who laughed and sang and rodehis motorcycle into the wind, who made her a stuffed raccoon and got it to come alive and be her friend, whom she trusted more than she’s ever trusted anyone? Could he really have said that, done that? And if he had, how could she have forgotten about it until now? Somehow, from somewhere, she knows that it’s true. She finds that she truly can’t stop shaking, and a wave of nausea comes over her.

Donna puts her arms around her, pulling her close. For the first time ever, Cameron stiffens, flinches at her touch. Donna blinks, staring at her. “Cam?”

Cameron wills herself to press her body into Donna’s, to take comfort in her presence the way she has done since the dream first began. But something is different, and both she and Donna know that it is. Cam closes her eyes, trying as hard as she can to forbid the tears from starting to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, ahoy! Dark arc ahead! Buckle up, and sorry about this. I don't like it either.


	27. Chapter 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna notices.

All during the following week, Donna tries to pretend that that there is nothing wrong with Cameron. Initially, that proves relatively easy, because the only thing really noticeable is how hard Cameron is working on some of the MusicLand enhancements. It’s not, Donna reminds herself whenever she is forced to think about it, as though Cam working tirelessly on a project is anything at all unusual.

What _is_ unusual, and—yes, dammit!—worrisome, is the fact that Cameron seems to be finding excuses this week to skip their standing 12:00 to 2:00 afternoon Phoenix meeting in favor of working with the coders at the old Mutiny building. Donna tells herself that this is actually a good thing, that it shows how Cameron is growing into her role as a supervisor and project manager. Still, it’s hard not to wonder if Cam is avoiding her, although Donna can’t understand why she would be. It’s not as though they’d had any sort of fight. In fact, now that she thinks about it, they haven’t even had the smallest of arguments since Donna’s original “I have an idea.”

At 12:30 PM on the fourth day in a row that Cameron hasn’t shown up at Symphonic, Donna is sitting at her desk, trying to fight off the waves of anxiety that insist on washing over her. She’s wondering if she ought to call Cameron, wondering if it would look too needy and demanding if she showed up at Phoenix in person. Donna sighs. It would be helpful, she thinks, to know if there is actually something to worry about, or if this whole thing is just the product of her own neurotic insecurities.

Donna is busy deciding what, if any, course of action to take when she hears a light rap on her door. Looking up, she sees Diane standing there, smiling at her.

“Come in,” says Donna, trying valiantly to pull herself together and give the impression of being a cool, collected business executive on a busy afternoon. “I haven’t seen you around here for awhile.”

“John and I have been doing a lot of day trips on the boat, but I thought it was time for me to check in and see how things are going here. I’m still a partner, at least until I pull the plug and retire for real.” Diane looks a little rueful, and Donna knows just how hard it’s going to be for Diane to sever ties with Symphonic completely. The firm means a lot to both of them.

“Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad to see you. Are you up for a lunch date?” Concern about Cameron still gnawing at her, Donna isn’t particularly hungry, so she’s somewhat relieved when she sees Diane shaking her head.

“Elias wants to go over a potential new client with me, and Trip and Tanya have a pitch later this afternoon that I need to prepare for. Rain check?” Diane grimaces, looking genuinely sorry that she can’t spend more time with Donna than just this quick hello.

Donna nods, wishing that she could confide in Diane, if only to get the opinion of a rational person not emotionally bound up in the whole thing. She can’t, of course: she suspects that Diane never thought that the idea of herself and Cameron as a couple made any sense at all, which makes the whole subject awkward. Still, there’s no denying that she feels utterly alone right now, no matter how hard she tries to pretend to herself that everything is actually fine.

Diane looks more carefully at Donna, seeming suddenly to sense a bit of what’s going on in her mind. “Hey . . . is anything wrong?”

Hesitatingly, feeling more than a little foolish, Donna shrugs. “I . . . I’m not sure, actually.” She’s also not sure how Diane will react to that response, but somehow she can’t quite bring herself to completely deny the doubts that are swirling around inside of her.

Diane pauses, as if she expects Donna to elaborate. When she doesn’t, Diane starts to say something, and then stops.

Looking at Diane’s concerned expression, all at once Donna decides to give her a little bit of it. “It’s just . . . Cam and I have been meeting at noon at Symphonic ever since we started Phoenix. We hardly ever miss it, no matter what else is going on, but Cam’s skipped that meeting every day so far this week. I just . . . I don’t know what to make of it.”

Diane looks at her. “Is that all? That could be anything, really. You know better than anyone else how focused Cameron can get when she’s coding. She might just be working on something really tricky this week and not want to stop.” Diane hesitates, and then continues. “Sometimes in a relationship, especially at the beginning, things settle and change, but it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong.”

Donna nods, but thinks to herself that of course there’s more to it than just the Phoenix meetings. There’s the fact that Cam has clearly been having some sort of recurring nightmare, that she doesn’t want Donna to comfort her when she’s obviously troubled, and that she’s . . . different. But since Donna doesn’t really want to focus on that part, and since she can hardly talk about it to Diane, she seizes gratefully on the comment about Cameron’s working style. After all, that’s exactly how she herself tried to explain away Cam’s behavior. Maybe, maybe this _is_ mostly about work. Maybe Donna is making more of it than she needs to be making.

 

**§§§**

Yet Donna is soon enough forced to admit that Cam is different at home, too. For one thing, she’s eating her dinner fast, and leaving as soon as she can to put in a few more hours of work at the dining room table. Although she might indeed be doing that because she’s deep into a coding project, the net effect is that she’s spending less time with Donna and more time alone. Donna doesn’t want to make a big deal about it—the very last thing that she desires is for Cameron to feel trapped and scrutinized—but at the same time, it’s proving impossible for her to ignore it, either. It’s barely been a week, but living and working with this odd shell of the Cameron she’s grown to love so much is squeezing Donna’s heart into a tight, dense knot of dread.

One night, just as Cam has finished shoveling her dinner into her mouth and is obviously about to head off for another work session, Haley clears her throat elaborately and dramatically and taps a glass with her spoon. Donna and Cameron both look at her.

Haley looks away, and when she looks back at the two of them, she’s glowing. “So, I just wanted you both to know . . . I got into Stanford.”

The dense knot of dread unclenches for the moment as Donna feels a surge of pure joy. Haley has been dreaming about Stanford for the last couple of years: it’s the perfect place for her to study robotics and artificial intelligence, which she’s been finding more and more fascinating. (Donna also knows that Jordan is going to Berkeley, and she’s pretty sure that Haley doesn’t consider the proximity to her girlfriend a minus.) “Honey, that’s wonderful. I’m so, so proud of you!”

Haley beams, and Donna glances at Cameron for an instant. She’s shocked and moved to see that Cam actually has tears in her eyes, tears that she’s trying hard to whisk away surreptitiously. “Guess we’re stuck with having you around for the next four years.” Cam and Haley grin at each other, and Donna’s insides flip just a little bit at their obvious love and rapport.

“Well, I’ll be living on campus, so you’ll probably only have to see me when I have some laundry to do.” Haley can’t manage to hide how happy she is right now, not that she’s trying very hard to do so.

Donna and Cameron look at each other, and in that brief moment of connection all the difficulties of the week melt away. “That’s good to hear,” says Donna, going over to give Haley a hug. God, she loves her family, Cameron included. _Please, please,_ she thinks to nobody in particular, _please don’t let anything happen to any of it._

 

**§§§**

But all too soon, Donna’s dense knot of dread returns in full force when Cameron starts going to bed after Donna does. She says that she just needs time at night to finish coding the new playlist options, time she can’t really find during the day because she’s so busy supervising the coders. That might sound plausible on the surface, but Donna doubts that it’s really the case: the coding for the playlist features isn’t complicated, and Cameron has spent enough extra hours working this week already to have completed it twice. Much as she wishes it not to be true, Donna knows that Cam wants to avoid their bedroom until Donna is already asleep.

And so, Donna tries to accommodate by pretending to be asleep when Cameron slips into bed beside her. Yet Donna can’t sleep at all, of course she can’t. She can’t fall asleep before Cam is next to her, because the absence is too glaring to allow for any sort of relaxation. She can’t fall asleep after Cam is finally there, because all she wants to do is put her arms around her and demand to know what’s going on in her head, and that’s the one thing she can’t allow herself to do. So she waits quietly, trying to feign sleep by breathing deeply and evenly until she knows that Cameron is asleep herself. And then, only then, does Donna permit herself to stroke Cam’s cheek, to put her head on Cam’s shoulder and feel the warmth of her skin. How, when, _why_ , she wonders, did they return to the time when Cam has to be unconscious for Donna to touch her?

 

**§§§**

By the middle of next week, Donna has become desperate enough that she needs to do something, anything, to break this new pattern. After some hesitation, she casually (too casually, she knows) suggests that they go out on a real date on Saturday.

Cameron hesitates, some odd combination of misery, longing, and guilt apparent on her face. “The Airstream is kind of a mess right now, so we probably shouldn’t go there.”

Donna’s heart drops at that, even though she hadn’t really been thinking about the Airstream for this weekend. Still, the fact that Cameron apparently doesn’t want her there is a bad, bad sign. The Airstream is where they always go to be alone together, to talk, to be close. She’s come to think of it as their own perfect little bubble, a place in which it’s them against the rest of the world. Donna finds that her eyes are welling, and she turns away so that Cameron won’t see it.

Cam apparently notices anyway, and the guilt part of her complicated expression intensifies. “Donna . . . “ She trails off, and Donna holds her breath a little, hoping that Cam is actually going to tell her what’s going on. When nothing else comes out of her mouth, Donna’s throat tightens.

Cam looks at her, sadness and anxiety flashing across her face. “Yeah, let’s do something. I want to.” Donna doesn’t know if Cam really wants to, but she doesn’t care. At this moment, just the thought of a real date with Cameron is more than enough,

Donna smiles at Cam. “Good. Me, too. I’ll plan something fun.” Donna secretly resolves to figure out the most wonderful day that she and Cameron have ever spent together. Maybe, maybe whatever they do will be enough to pull them out of this strange rough patch that has come along without warning, a rough patch that Donna hopes will leave just as quickly.

 

**§§§**

When Saturday comes, Donna is feeling pretty good about her date choices. She’s optimistic that the day she has planned will put herself and Cameron back on track.

As she’s driving them to their first stop, Cam gives her a quick smile. “So, no hints?”

“Nope,” Donna smiles back. “Just hang out and enjoy the ride.”

The silence between them is more comfortable than it’s been for the past couple of weeks, and Donna actually finds herself relaxing, even humming softly to herself as they drive.

When they pull into the parking lot of “Pinball Wizardry,” a large, retro pinball arcade that just opened up on the outskirts of San Francisco, Donna looks expectantly at Cameron. She thinks that this place is going to be perfect: not only does it call back to their Day of Fun in Florida a year and a half ago, but Cameron has told her how her father used to take her to a pinball arcade almost every weekend before he left for Vietnam. Donna, however, heart sinking, can see from Cam’s odd expression that something is wrong. Her feeling of buoyant optimism slowly begins to fade.

“Hey . . . if you don’t want to do this, we can do something else. There are some good movies playing, or there’s bowling, or miniature golf, or . . .” Donna knows that she’s babbling at this point, but her need to find _something_ to do to connect with Cameron right now is overwhelming.

Cam shakes her head, and Donna can see that she’s trying to look enthusiastic, even though she’s not succeeding at it very well. “No, this is great—really, it totally is.”

Donna nods, still feeling suddenly doubtful. “Ok, good.” They enter the building, and Donna remembers seeing similar rows of blinking pinball machines in Florida, a sight that at the time had filled them both with wonderment. Glancing sideways at Cameron, Donna thinks she appears much more stricken than enchanted right now.

She presses a roll of quarters (which she had thought to come armed with this time around) into Cameron’s hand. Cam glances up at her, looking a little lost. All at once, Donna starts to feel frustrated and almost irritated. What could possibly be going on with Cameron right now? It’s _pinball_ , for God’s sake!

Pushing all that to the back of her mind, Donna tries to recapture some semblance of a spirit of fun and adventure. She surveys the room and chooses a pinball machine at random. “How about this one?”

Cameron goes over to inspect it. “Yeah. I know that one. I used to play that with my dad.” She doesn’t say anything else.

Donna is relieved that Cameron has some good associations with this machine; maybe that will help pull her out of this mysterious funk “Why don’t you start? Or maybe we can each man one of the flippers, so we can play together?”

Cameron nods, and Donna puts the quarter in.The game lights up, and they both try to keep the ball going. Donna is concentrating so hard on that, in fact, that she doesn’t notice for a minute or two that Cameron’s face has gone white.

“Cam?” Donna stares at her, losing the ball in the process. “What’s . . . what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I just . . . I just don’t really feel well.” Cameron certainly appears to be telling the truth; in fact, she looks as though she might throw up at any moment. Donna is suddenly frightened.

“Do you need me to . . .” Donna isn’t sure what, in fact, Cam might need her to do, but she desperately wants—needs—to do _something_.

“No, I’ll be ok . . . I just have to . . .” Cam looks around, sees a restroom, and hurries off to it, leaving Donna miserable and alone.

 

**§§§**

They drive back home in silence, both knowing without discussing it that the attempt at a Saturday date is over before it actually began. Cameron is slumped in the passenger seat with her eyes closed and her head pressed against the window.Donna, eyes on the road and trying not to glance at Cam, is concentrating on not crying.

When they get home, Donna notices how utterly exhausted Cameron seems, as if her entire life force has been squeezed out of her. She looks, Donna thinks, the way she had been that day at Cardiff thirteen years ago, when she thought they couldn’t recover the BIOS code that she’d worked so hard to create: alone, miserable, emotionally and physically drained.

“Do you want to go lie down?” Donna asks it tentatively, not really knowing what she should say or do right now. “Maybe a nap would help.”

She expects Cam to protest, to try to argue that she has to work, but to her surprise Cameron only nods. She gives Donna a look that’s heart-aching in its anguish and, head down, walks slowly into the bedroom. Donna watches her go until she hears the door clicking shut.

After about an hour, Donna gives up weighing her options and wondering about the right thing to do or say. Not able to stand any of it anymore, she opens the door to the bedroom to check on Cameron. Cam is lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, not moving but not asleep. Donna notices that she’s clutching the ratty old stuffed raccoon that her father had made her many years ago. Cameron turns her head when she hears Donna. “Hey.” She stuffs the raccoon under her pillow, and Donna wonders why she’d attempt to hide it.

Donna slides into the bed next to her. “How are you feeling?”

Cam shrugs, and Donna puts a tentative arm around her. “Cam, we have to talk about this. What’s going on?”

Cameron leans against her and closes her eyes. “Can we just . . . maybe not talk about it? It’s just something that I’m dealing with, but I’d rather not think about it right now. I’m . . .I’m really sorry.” Her voice is pleading.

 _But you’re not dealing with it, not really._ Donna’s heart breaks a little, both because it kills her to see Cameron like this, and because she realizes now that Cameron doesn’t trust her—not fully, not completely, not the way she wants to be trusted. Donna reflects on her marriage to Gordon, on the secrets that they kept from one another. _Not talking about it isn’t going to work_ , she wants to tell Cameron. But she can’t bring herself to say that, not right now, not with Cameron so sad and so vulnerable. So she says nothing at all, kisses Cam on the forehead, listens to her sigh, pulls her close, and tries not to think about what’s coming next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys might have wondered why I've tagged this fic "Angst with a Happy Ending," when we had no angst at all more than halfway through the whole story. Worry not--angst is officially here now!
> 
> We're back to weekly updates, starting next week. Summer is flying by!


	28. Chapter 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron tries and fails.

When Cameron wakes up the next morning, even before she opens her eyes fully she can tell that Donna isn’t there. Cam is partly relieved—she desperately wants to avoid some big conversation—but she somehow also wants (unfairly, she knows) to curl up next to Donna, not say anything, and just feel _better_ , better in the way that only Donna is capable of making her feel. Cam puts her head on Donna’s pillow and breathes in the smell of that expensive coconut hair conditioner she uses. It’s a poor substitute for the actual Donna, but it’s all she has right now. (And, she thinks miserably, remembering every minute of yesterday’s pinball arcade debacle, probably all that she really deserves.)

Over the years, there have been quite a few things about her interactions with Donna that Cameron has regretted intensely: not noticing how wrung out Donna had been right before her abortion; almost destroying Community before it had a chance to take off; pushing Donna out of the browser project that had been her idea in the first place; not seeking Donna out after she came to the Airstream to get Cam to sign away the rights to the Rover algorithm, when it had been obvious that something was very, very wrong with her. But right now, right here, the way she’s been acting toward Donna over the last couple of weeks seems to rival any of those. Cameron hasn’t hated herself quite this much, and quite this hard, in a long, long time. What is she doing? Why is the instinct to crawl into a hole and be by herself so strong right now?

Cam rolls over on her back and stares at the ceiling. After all, what sane person can’t get through an afternoon at a pinball arcade without becoming violently ill?She knows that Donna had every reason to expect Cameron to love it there: that arcade in Florida had been special to both of them. But as soon as Cam stepped into the place, all she could hear and see and feel was her father. ( _Hey, turnip . . . bet you can’t beat me at this one!_ ) She had loved those Saturdays with her dad, just the two of them, hanging out, playing games, eating burgers. Every week, they got to be in their own special little world.

( _Fucking faggots._ )

Cam shuts her eyes tightly, trying to block it out. Trying to stop herself from realizing once again that her father couldn’t have been the person she had known him to be. Trying not to imagine what he would think of her today, what they would say to each other.

( _She doesn’t need to see that shit._ )

Cam sits up abruptly and glances at the clock on her bedside table. It’s after 10:00. She gets up, throws on a pair of sweat pants, decides that the t-shirt she slept in will do for one more day, and runs her fingers through her hair. She hopes that Donna is still up for their usual Sunday brunch, because, starting right now, Cameron is going to start acting like a normal person instead of a freak. She’ll fix this, and she’ll just shove all memories of her father into the past where they belong. After all, he’s been dead for twenty-five years. It’s not like any of it matters anymore.

 

**§§§**

When Cam enters the kitchen, she finds Haley eating a bowl of cereal and Donna making scrambled eggs. She smiles at both of them as she slides into her chair, trying to appear as typical-Sunday-morning-Cameron as possible.

Donna’s glance over is both tentative and hopeful. “Eggs for you?”

“Yeah. That sounds good.” Cameron looks at Donna, thinking _I love you_ (the thing she never seems quite able to say out loud but that bubbles over in her mind constantly) and _I’m sorry_. She hopes that Donna is able to see inside her right now.

Donna’s look is soft and affectionate, so presumably she actually can. She hands Cameron a plate of eggs, with plenty of cheddar cheese and some fresh herbs sprinkled on top. Cam digs into them, savoring both the taste and the comfort of the Sunday routine. Everything, she thinks, is going to be fine.

“So,” Donna says casually, taking a forkful of her own eggs and swallowing it. “What are we all doing today?”

Haley looks over at her mother. “Jordan and I are going to a Katharine Hepburn festival in Palo Alto—I think it’s like six movies. It’ll go pretty late tonight. Is it ok if I sleep over at her house and go to school from there in the morning?” Donna hesitates and then nods. Cam is glad that Donna is deciding to be the cool mom right now. After all, Haley has already been accepted into Stanford. Getting to school on Monday a little sleepy won’t kill her.

“It’s an awfully nice day to lock yourself up in a dark movie theater, isn’t it?” When Haley shrugs, Donna looks over at Cameron and smiles. They both know that Haley doesn’t really care where she is with Jordan, as long as they’re hanging out together. Cameron hopes that this feeling will last for Haley as long as it possibly can, and that when it ends (as it probably will, as most things eventually do), it doesn’t hurt too much.

Cam gives herself a mental shake, trying hard not to connect that thought to any possible future (or non-future) with Donna. “Hey, why don’t we do something outdoorsy today?” They need an outing, Cameron thinks, something to erase yesterday, something to get everything back to normal. An outdoor date might be exactly the thing for them.

Donna can’t keep herself from smiling, her expression so openly eager that it causes a pang to Cameron’s heart. “That’s ok by me, if you’d like that. Where do you have in mind?”

 

**§§§**

They decide to go to Lands End and hike along the California Coastal Trail. Neither of them has ever been there, but it’s an easy drive from Mountain View, and the view of the Pacific coastline along the rocky cliffs is supposed to be spectacular. They pick a trail that’s a six-mile loop, and it turns out to be every bit as breathtaking as its reputation had predicted. Cameron, not usually big on exercise for the sake of exercise, finds herself loving everything about the hike. She and Donna don’t talk much, but it’s a silence that’s companionable rather than awkward. Cam can tell that Donna is giving her space and time, trying not to ask her questions or push her into difficult conversations, and some of the tension that Cameron has been carrying inside eases because of it. They have each other, the rhythm of the walk, the pleasant feeling of getting physically tired, the amazing sight of the Pacific coast, and that’s more than enough right now.

It’s almost 4:00 when they finish the hike—too early for dinner, but they’re both hungry and haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast. They decide to stop at a local diner a few miles from the trail for sandwiches.

Cameron slides easily into the booth across from Donna, feeling more relaxed than she’s felt in the past two weeks. Donna also seems lighter and happier than she has been for awhile. “That was fun. I’m glad you wanted to do this.”

“Yeah, me too,” Cam says. “I’m starving. What are you going to have?” She decides on a cheeseburger and a chocolate malt, and Donna goes for a root beer float and a tuna melt. Classic diner food, Cameron thinks contentedly, remembering the hours in that diner more than a year ago that gave birth to Phoenix, and birth to everything else in her life right now. She grins at Donna. It all really _is_ fine.

And it might actually have stayed fine, she thinks to herself much later, if Donna hadn’t started talking about her father’s plans for retirement.

“I mean, he’s almost seventy, so it’s definitely time, but that company is everything to him—I just don’t know what he’s going to do with himself, besides play golf and drive my mother crazy.” Donna takes a sip of her ice water and shakes her head.

Cameron nods, because she can’t think of anything intelligent to say to that. She tries and fails to picture what her father would have looked like at seventy, but she finds the idea unfathomable. Before she has time to rally her defenses, she feels herself breaking out into a cold sweat.

Donna, apparently not picking up on Cameron’s sudden emotional shift, is still talking. “They’re thinking about traveling more, but my dad always hated going places when I was a kid. I just hope he can find something that he likes to do.”

At that moment the waitress arrives with their food. Cameron looks at her cheeseburger, all appetite suddenly gone. She picks up the burger and plows into it, determined to finish it or die in the attempt. She glances at Donna and sees that some of her lightness has dimmed; Donna, finally, now notices clearly that something, somehow, has gone wrong. Somehow, Cam can tell that Donna isn’t going to ask her about it, that she realizes that the repeated “are you ok?’s” haven’t yielded anything, and aren’t likely to in the future. Heart sinking, Cam knows that the connection they’ve been feeling all day has vanished. She concentrates on swallowing mouthfuls of cheeseburger washed down with gulps of chocolate milkshake, wondering what else she can do to fix this thing that she’s broken.

 

**§§§**

They’re both quiet on the drive home, with Cameron desperately trying to come up with something to say or do that might make everything better between them. The best she has is to suggest that they watch a movie that evening.

“I rented _Clueless_ the other day—it’s supposed to be funny.” Cameron tries to sound offhand, but Donna gives her a sharp look: _Clueless_ is much more Donna’s sort of movie than Cam’s, and the fact that Cam chose it makes it obvious how hard she’s trying to push everything back to normal, to make things up to Donna. Cameron doesn’t know whether showing her hand like that is good or bad, but that probably doesn’t matter: it’s not something that can actually be helped right now.

“Sure, that sounds good. We can just have popcorn for dinner, since that diner food was pretty enormous.” Donna’s careful phrasing makes it is clear to Cam that Donna had, in fact, noticed thatCameron could barely choke down that cheeseburger. Cam sighs to herself, wishing that she could sometimes manage to be the sort of person who doesn’t display every damn thing she’s thinking or feeling for all the world to see (or at least, for Donna to see).

Donna makes the promised popcorn, pushes the video into the VCR, switches off the lights, and settles down on the couch next to Cam. Hesitating only briefly, Cam lays her head on Donna’s shoulder with a sigh. All at once, it’s occurring to her that they haven’t had sex since the stupid dream turned everything in her life upside down. That needs to change, she thinks, and it needs to change right now. She kisses Donna tentatively, and then more confidently as she feels Donna respond. This is what they need, Cameron is sure of it. She wants this—desperately, intensely; she needs to feel Donna everywhere that she can, to banish the darkness once and for all. Donna’s breath catches, and Cam knows that Donna wants it just as much.

_She doesn’t need to see that shit._

And just as suddenly, heart pounding, Cam jerks away before she consciously realizes what she’s about to do. She hears Donna gasp, a very different sort of gasp from the one that Cameron had heard from her moments before. With a swift motion, Donna pauses the movie and switches on the lights, their glare transforming the room from a safe cocoon into a hostile space. Shaking, Cameron looks can’t bring herself to look up.

“Cameron, what the hell is going on?” Donna’s voice is rough with hurt.

Cam shrugs. What can she say? There’s no way to make Donna understand any of this, when she doesn’t even understand it herself, not really. It’s just a fucked up mess, and it’s her mess, not Donna’s.

“That’s it? We need to talk about this. Did I do something?” The small quaver at the end of the question breaks Cameron’s heart.

“No!” It’s all Cam can muster, and even choking out that single word is proving almost impossible.

“Then what is it? I’ve been patient for two weeks, but I just can’t be patient forever. You’ve got to let me in a little.” Donna’s voice is rising, even though Cameron can see that she’s trying mightily to keep it calm and even.

Cam doesn’t answer because she doesn’t know what to say. She turns away and stares at the throw pillows on the couch, noticing the fraying threads of the one on the left. _We need new pillows,_ she thinks to herself, wondering about the automatic “we,” wondering if she has any justifiable claim over these pillows at all.

Donna is still talking, and her words start to penetrate Cameron’s semi-trance. “. . . always have to be so self-destructive?”

Cameron jerks her head up and stares at Donna. “What?”

“I said, why do you have to be so self-destructive? Have you ever asked yourself that?” To Cameron, in this moment Donna sounds exactly like everyone who has ever tried to make her feel bad about who she is; it’s the same scolding, patronizing tone her mother always used when she wanted to change Cam into someone else entirely. That tone acts as a catalyst, distilling Cam’s guilt and misery and fear into something a lot simpler and more basic: anger. Where the hell is this psychoanalytical crap coming from?

“I’m not self-destructive.” Cam’s voice is tight. Right now, Cameron isn’t about to consider whether there’s any truth to what Donna is saying: she only knows that she doesn’t need accusations on top of everything else that she’s dealing with. Screw this. Screw everything.

“Cam, you are. Come on; you know that you are. You did it at Mutiny; you’ve done it as long as I’ve known you. When things get to be too much, even good things, you blow them up.” Donna’s voice is gentle; she isn’t lecturing anymore. But Cam’s flash of anger is still smoldering inside her, its white-hotflame burning out everything else.

“I think Mutiny had just a _little_ help blowing up, apart from any self-destructive crimes that I supposedly committed.” It’s out of Cameron’s mouth before she has a chance to realize what she’s about to say.

Donna stares at her, ashen, all expression draining from her face. She looks away, and when she looks back, her eyes are open wounds. Cameron can’t believe what she’s just done to her. “Donna . . .”

Tears are spilling out of Donna’s eyes and running down her cheeks. “This was your fucking idea.”

Cam feels as though Donna has just slapped her. “What?”

“You wanted this. We were _fine_. We were _happy_. You were the one who wanted more than that. And you were . . . you were _right_. It’s been . . . why are you doing this?” Donna’s sobs are audible now, and suddenly Cameron can’t breathe. It’s a panic attack, she knows it from the way her chest is constricting, her face burning, her skin starting to itch. She tries to say something and gasps instead.

Donna is stepping toward her. “Cam?”

Cameron can’t bear that sudden note of concern, and she can’t look at how crumpled into herself Donna is right now. All she can think about is how she has to get out of this room, this place, immediately. She stands up abruptly, somehow finding a voice with which to speak. “I . . . have to go.”

“What?” Donna is looking at her, beseeching. “Cam, please don’t . . . we need to . . .”

Cam can’t catch her breath once again, can’t let Donna see her like this. She turns, half blind, and bolts out of the house, the sound of Donna’s quiet sobs growing fainter as the door clicks shut. She sits in her truck for a moment, trying to breath, to force away the dizziness and stop the rising nausea. Cameron isn’t sure exactly how long all of that takes, but eventually she realizes that the truck is moving, that she’s driving, almost as if she actually has somewhere that she wants to go.

 

**§§§**

Cameron looks numbly around the Airstream, wondering how exactly it was that she got here. She’s breathing normally again, but she barely remembers the hour-long drive from Donna’s house.

Donna.

Cam’s chest tightens, and she throws herself onto the bed, trying to keep herself from thinking about anything at all. She studies her rack of CD’s, looking for the loudest, punkest, most Cameron-in-1983 one that she can find. She pushes [One Way System’s _Writing on the Wall_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsgdhmmk8so) into her boom box and turns the volume up as loud as she can.Good. No feelings, no regrets, just noise and energy. Exactly what she needs right now.

 _It's a corrupted world_  
_It's a messed up world_  
_It's a corrupted world_  
_A troubled world_

Later, much later, after the album ends and Cameron is sitting alone in the sudden silence, she glances over and sees that stupid stuffed raccoon that got her through bad days and bad nights as far back as she can remember. She picks it up, cradles it for just a second, and then opens the door and flings it outside as far as she can. Fucking raccoon. Only then, only after it has disappeared into the darkness of her land, only when she knows she’ll never be able to find it again, does everything that she’s lost hit her. It’s over, and, as usual, it’s all her fault. Donna is right: she destroys everything and everyone that she cares about, and she always has. Only then does she curl up on her bed, alone, and allow a single sob to escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What a freaking mess!


	29. Chapter 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna is miserable.

Somewhere in a distant haze, Donna hears a tap at her bedroom door. Opening one eye, she sees sunlight streaming in. She has no idea what time it might be.

“Mom?” It’s Haley’s voice, tentative, anxious. At the sound of it, something deep and maternal within Donna makes her struggle to answer in as steady a voice as she can muster.

“I’m fine, honey. I just . . . I’m not feeling well. I need to rest a little.” All true things, Donna thinks, except maybe the “fine” part. All she wants to do right now is sleep and not have to think about Cameron.

Donna sighs as she hears the door opening. “Come in.”

Donna forces herself to sit up and appear as normal as possible; the very last thing that she wants to do is to make Haley worry about her. She glances at the watch on her night table: 4:00 p.m. That means, Donna calculates, that she’s been in bed for the past sixteen or so hours.

“How was the film festival?” Donna asks, slightly amazed that she’s even able to recall where exactly Haley had been last night. She’s just relieved that Haley hadn’t been _here_ , hadn’t had to witness the fight with Cameron, hadn’t had to hear Cam driving off in her truck. The desire to do the impossible, to protect her daughter from anything bad in the world, somehow to make up for the divorce and for the death of her father, manages to remain strong, regardless of what else might be going on in Donna’s life.

“Ok. Fun.” Haley hesitates and then sits on the edge of Donna’s bed. The intimacy of the gesture makes Donna’s eyes fill with tears, and she turns away in a vain attempt to hide them from Haley. When she looks back, she sees that Haley looks even more concerned than she had before. Dammit.

“Mom . . . what happened? Was it . . . is it something with Cameron?” Haley sounds awkward, and Donna can’t blame her; this is hardly a conversational subject that that teenagers are expected to master discussing with their mothers. Donna finds herself torn among conflicting desires to reassure her daughter, to tell her the truth, and—the selfish desire, and perhaps the deepest one of all—to derive some comfort, to feel just a tiny bit less bewildered and numb than she feels right now.

Donna finally settles on something that won’t satisfy any of these needs. “It’s going to be ok.” She wonders dully if there’s even a small part of her that actually believes what she’s saying to Haley.

The look that Haley is giving her right now is a loving one, and suddenly she seems much older than seventeen, much wiser and more together, in fact, than Donna herself. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Donna thinks about the question. Does she? Not really, not right now. She just wants to sleep and not think about anything at all. So she smiles at Haley and shakes her head.

Haley looks sad, and Donna can’t stand the fact that she’s doing this to her, and that she can’t seem to help doing it. She tries again. “I’ll be ok, really. I just want . . . I don’t know what I want, actually.”

Haley smiles. “Do you maybe want some cinnamon toast and tea?”

Donna finds herself smiling back at her. Cinnamon toast and tea is their traditional sick-in-bed food, comfort food, and suddenly she finds herself wanting it very much. “Yeah, I do. Thank you.” The rush of love she feels toward her daughter right now almost overwhelms her. She tries not to think about where Cameron might be right now and what she might be doing—Cameron, with nobody to bring her cinnamon toast and tea to make her feel better. Donna shakes the thought off and just tries to pull herself together enough to rejoin the world as a functional human being.

 

**§§§**

Donna can’t, of course, force herself to stop thinking about Cameron forever. Her disobedient mind insists on going over every moment of the past couple of weeks: the nightmare that Cam never talked about; Cameron’s becoming more and more distant; the date at the arcade that ended so disastrously; the hike along the California Coastal Trail, which Cam genuinely seemed to enjoy; Cameron’s suggestion that they watch _Clueless_ , which told Donna everything she needed to know about just how much Cam was trying; the makeout session that Cam initiated, that was on the brink of becoming something more; and then . . . Cameron pulling away abruptly, just before it could. The fight _. I think Mutiny had just a_ little _help blowing up, apart from any self-destructive crimes that I supposedly committed._

Donna closes her eyes, trying to stop that sentence from reverberating inside her brain. She realizes that Cameron had instantly regretted saying it; she had looked gutted the second that those words were out of her mouth. Cameron, Donna knows, would rather cut off her arm than hurt Donna intentionally. Yet still, the idea that the Mutiny betrayal is still buried somewhere inside of Cameron, ready to be blurted out in moments of stress, still able to be used as a quick defensive weapon, spooks Donna. It also makes her wonder if what she and Cameron have been building together will ever be strong enough to withstand the hard knocks that life will always be sending their way. Was she wrong to want to give this a try? Was it doomed to end in a failure that might indeed ruin their business, ruin everything? And if it did, would they even still be able to remain the sort of friends that they had become before Cam kissed her that day and started her life on this strange new path?

Donna wrestles with these questions for the remainder of the night, finally dozing off sometime before dawn. When she wakes up a little after 8:00, she knows that the house is empty and that Haley has gotten herself off to school. Donna sits up. She can’t hide in her bed forever: she’s a grownup with work to do and people depending on her to do that work. It’s bad enough that she had wallowed so much and so intensely yesterday that she hadn’t even managed to call Tanya and let her know that she wouldn’t be coming into the office that day. After all, she’s not a lovesick teenager, and it’s time that she stopped acting like one. And maybe, just maybe, she thinks to herself before she can stop the admittedly lovesick thought, Cameron will show up for their regular Phoenix meeting at noon.

 

**§§§**

But when noon arrives , Cameron isn’t there. Donna tries to ignore the sick, sinking feeling inside her gut, tries to stop her throat from thickening and her eyes from filling with tears. She forces herself not to download her email every five minutes, looking in vain for a message—any message, even the most perfunctory one, even one simply devoted to some routine bit of Phoenix business. But there’s nothing at all from camhowe@phoenix.com, nothing to let Donna know that Cameron is at least functionally all right, let alone how she’s feeling and what she’s doing. It’s as though, Donna thinks, Cam has slipped out of this universe and entered some sort of black hole at the very edge of the galaxy,

Three more days pass without any word from Cameron, either on the phone, or by email, or in flesh and blood. Donna finds herself growing increasingly frantic, and the only thing that keeps her from melting down completely is the fact that she needs to preserve some semblance of normality for Haley’s sake. She picks up the phone almost ever hour, only to hang up before she even begins dialing. She starts emails with subject lines like _Are you ok?_ and _We should talk_ and (most pathetically of all) _I miss you._ Yet Donna rarely manages to write more than these subject lines before deleting the emails and starting over again. She just honestly can’t think of what to say or do, or even when or how to say it or do it.

She knows that people at Symphonic have noticed Cameron’s absence and are wondering about it: Trip has been giving her odd glances, peculiar crosses between curiosity and sympathy, and Tanya looks even more serious than usual. Donna wishes that her personal life were not on display for her co-workers, but she supposes that it can’t be helped. Symphonic is a fishbowl, and there’s no practical way to hide much within it.

When Tanya taps lightly on Donna’s office door, Donna looks up and motions for her to come in.

“So, I just wanted to give you a quick update about the financial projections for MusicLand for Q3. We’re on track to triple our user base by the end of September, and that’s probably a conservative estimate.” Tanya doesn’t appear as happy as someone delivering such good news would normally be expected to be. Instead, she gives Donna a concerned look, clearly wanting to say something personal and not certain that doing so would be appropriate.

Donna makes a sudden decision. “Tanya, can I ask you to do something, and can I also ask that you do it without asking me why?

Tanya nods, apparently relieved at Donna’s question. “You can ask me to do anything.”

Donna takes a deep breath. “Could you go down to Phoenix this afternoon and see if Cam is there, or if she’s been there at all this week?” She glances away so she won’t have to take in whatever Tanya’s reaction might be, embarrassed but glad that she’s at least managed to take this very small, very indirect step toward inching her way back to Cameron.

Tanya returns to Donna’s office late that afternoon. “She wasn’t there, and apparently nobody has seen or heard from her all week. They’re all pretty busy finishing up the coding for the livestream Billy Joel concert next month, but Cam also isn’t answering emails when they have questions. They’re actually getting worried about her.” Tanya’s expression is carefully blank and neutral, for which Donna is grateful.

“Thanks, Tanya. I’ll . . . it’ll be ok.” Donna thinks about how often she’s been saying this lately, both to herself and to others, and how it seems less and less true every time she does.

Fuck this. She needs to talk to someone about Cameron, and the only one who might possibly have some insight into everything is Bos, Bos who loves Cameron deeply and who probably understands her better than anyone on earth. “Tanya, I’m going to take the rest of the afternoon off. Email me if anything comes up.” Tanyanods, a flash of sympathy replacing the neutral expression for a second or two. Donna gives her a smile, thinking to herself with some surprise that the connection between herself and Tanya seems to have matured into outright affection over the past year. She feels lucky to have someone like Tanya on her side right now.

 

**§§§**

Bos answers the door on the first ring of the doorbell. “Hey, now. Diane’s off shopping, or some such. She thinks she needs a few more of those blazers, but what she really needs is an extra closet for the ones that she already has.” He chuckles.

Donna feels suddenly nervous. Can she really talk about any of this to Bos? “Actually . . . I came to see you.”

Bos gives her a curious look, and Donna can’t really blame him for that; she and Bos rarely talk one-on-one, and Donna has to admit that, because of her possible role in his heart attack, she still feels occasional awkward flashes whenever she sees him. But that is what it is; she has nobody else to turn to who might be able to help her with Cameron.

Bos is pointing toward the garage. “That’s where I do all my serious talkin’ and thinkin’. That all right with you?”

Donna nods; anywhere is all right with her right now. She follows Bos into the garage and settles into one of the two chairs in the space.

Bos is rummaging in his refrigerator. “Beer?”

Donna hesitates. She’s gotten her drinking under control over the past couple of years by adhering to some very strict rules, the strictest of which is Do Not Drink While Upset, since therein lies an almost certain path to out-of-control self-medication, which is what started her problem with alcohol in the first place. Drinking to celebrate or drinking to unwind doesn’t seem to have the negative effects on her that drinking to make herself feel better always seems to. Noticing her indecision, Bos solves the problem by handing her a can of Coke, which she accepts with relief.

Bos sits in the chair across from her and opens his own bottle of beer. “What’s on your mind, Donna?” He really seems to want to know, and Donna feels slightly more at ease. She opens her Coke and takes a sip, giving herself a little time to figure out exactly how she wants to start this conversation.

“Have you seen Cam this week at all?” That’s a straightforward opener, Donna thinks, and she actually does want to know the answer.

Bos takes a sip of his beer. “Nope, haven’t seen her lately. It’s been a couple of weeks, I guess, but that’s not unusual. Cam’s never been real regular about her visits.”

Donna thinks about that, not sure if she’s relieved or disappointed that Cameron apparently hasn’t confided anything to Bos. She’s conscious of a dull, throbbing ache in the back of her head and she shuts her eyes for just a moment, not certain of what she wants to ask Bos, or what he might be able to tell her if she manages to put together a coherent chain of thought.

“Are you and Cameron . . . all right?” Bos sounds a little awkward, but not unduly so, and for some reason, both the question and its underlying kindness almost unglue Donna entirely. God, what a ridiculous mess she is. She has no business being out in public if she can’t even manage to keep it together in a simple conversation.

“It’s just . . . well, we had sort of a fight, but I’m not actually sure what we were fighting about, or how it happened. That was Sunday night, and I haven’t seen Cam since. I just . . . I just wish I knew what was going on. I do know that she’s been really upset about something, but she’s not talking about it, at least not to me.” Tears do come into Donna’s eyes then, but she manages to blink them away, and she’s hoping that Bos isn’t seeing them. He’s studying his beer rather than looking at her, so there’s at least a sporting chance that she’s pulling it off.

“Cameron is . . . well, you know her as well as I do, better than I do, maybe. But you’ve gotta remember that she just sort of feels things harder than most of us do.” Bos does look at Donna then, his expression thoughtful.

Donna nods. “I know that. I . . . love that about her. But this thing is different. I think—no, I _know_ —that it’s a big deal to her, and I just don’t understand why she won’t talk to me about it.” That’s the crux of it, Donna thinks. It’s not that Cameron hurt her feelings by bringing up Mutiny. It’s that she thought she _had_ to do something like that to push Donna away, even if she only thought it subconsciously. Why would she want to do that? Why doesn’t Cam trust her?

Donna is startled when Bos appears to respond to her inner thoughts. “Trusting people is hard for Cam, harder than it probably should be. I told her once that she had more love in her than anyone I ever met, and I think that’s part of the whole thing. She loves hard and deep, but trust . . . that’s a horse of a different color.” Bos’s gaze is strong and direct now, as if he’s trying to communicate the wisdom of the ages to Donna. And for Donna, it’s more or less exactly that; for all she knows, Bos alone possesses the Rosetta Stone that can unlock the mysteries of Cameron Howe.

Donna looks at Bos a little wistfully, “She trusts you.” However unsure she may be about everything else, Donna is certain of that: Cam trusts Bos, and she always has. Donna knows that shouldn’t bother her, but the little twinges of _something_ are impossible to ignore.

Still apparently struggling to convey something difficult, Bos doesn’t respond directly to Donna’s statement. “Cam has never talked to me much about how it was for her growing up, but she’s told me enough. She was on her own from pretty much the beginning. The people who were supposed to love her and take care of her, well, they checked out. She never really had anyone. That would have been rough on any kid, but I think it was even rougher on Cam just because . . . because of who she is.”

Donna’s heart aches at Bos’s words. It’s true, she realizes: Cam’s father left her by dying, and her mother left her by being too wrapped up in her own pain and problems to be there for her daughter. No wonder Cam is such a complicated blend of bravado and vulnerability, and no wonder she has trouble giving herself up to others, even to those whom she loves.

Suddenly, a sickening thought hits Donna broadside, and she almost audibly gasps at its impact. When she finally speaks, her voice is so soft that she’s genuinely not certain whether she’s talking to herself or to Bos. “I did it to her, too.” Of all the many, many ways that Donna has thought about what happened between herself and Cameron at Mutiny, she had never thought about it quite this way before. Cam had trusted Donna then, had probably even _loved_ Donna then, and Donna had abandoned her, just as everyone else had always abandoned her. The once-familiar hot burn of self-loathing that Donna hasn’t experienced in over a year is back in full force.

Bos doesn’t comment on that, and Donna is glad that he’s not brushing off what she’s just said in a false attempt to make her feel better; feeling better isn’t what she wants or needs right now. “One thing I’ve learned in all of these years on this planet is that we can only move forward. If you want to find out what’s going on with Cam, you have to make it happen.”

Donna nods; Bos, she knows, is right. If she wants Cameron to talk to her, to trust her, she has to stop waiting for some sort of magical intervention. She needs to stop being delicate, giving Cam space, waiting for her to come back. That has a time and a place, but the time and place for it has passed. No matter how hard it might be (and it _will_ be hard), she has to go to Cameron. She can’t force Cam to talk to her, but at least she can make it more likely that she will by being in the same physical space.

 

**§§§**

Donna hasn’t felt so uneasy about driving to Cameron’s Airstream for a long, long time, not since she went to find Cameron in Florida, maybe not even since that very first trip to Cameron’s land to get her to sign away the rights to the Rover algorithm. She glances at her watch, realizing how late it’s somehow gotten: she’d spent more than an hour with Bos, and it would be getting dark just as she arrived at Cam’s land. With relief, Donna remembers that Hailey is going out with Jordan tonight, and that she’d be staying at her house for the weekend. Donna feels a flash of guilt at just how absent a parent she seems to have become lately, but at least she won’t be abandoning her daughter without a word of explanation to chase after Cameron. (Or rather, that’s exactly what she _will_ be doing, but thankfully Haley will probably never realize that.)

All too quickly, Donna’s car is gliding toward the Airstream, and she sees Cam’s truck parked outside. (It’s a relief to see the truck, because honestly, if Cameron weren’t at the Airstream, she could be anywhere in the world. Donna feels a sudden flash of sympathy for what Joe probably went through when Cameron disappeared to Europe with Alexa so abruptly after they broke up.)

Turning off the ignition, Donna waits for a few seconds to see if Cameron would come out of the trailer on her own—surely she must have heard the car. When Cam doesn’t appear, Donna closes her eyes for a moment to brace herself. Then all at once, she gets out of the car, walks toward the Airstream, and raps on the door.

“Cameron?” Donna doesn’t hear a sound, but she knows that Cam has to be there. It’s practically dusk, and she can’t imagine that Cam is hiking through the woods right now.

Donna tries again. “Cam, we need to talk. I’m not going anywhere until you let me in.” (Donna doesn’t mean this statement to sound as metaphorical as it comes out, but it’s too late to say something else.)

Nothing. Donna is starting to feel slightly ridiculous and a touch hysterical, but she’s not backing down now. It’s time to jump. “Fine. I’m going to sit at your picnic table all night if I have to.” She means it, thinking how lucky she is that it’s a mild May evening. As she walks toward the picnic table, she spies a vaguely familiar furry thing off to the side, half buried in mud. On inspection, she sees that it’s Cam’s old stuffed raccoon. What is it doing out here? Donna picks it up and puts it into the pocket of her jacket.

Donna is just settling down, wishing that she had a book and a flashlight, when the door to Cameron’s Airstream suddenly opens. And Cameron is there, not meeting Donna’s eyes, not saying anything. The sight of her is such a vast relief that Donna nearly staggers from the force of it.

When Cam finally looks up, her eyes pools of mute misery and apology, Donna has to fight with herself from running up to her to hug her tightly. “Hey.”

Cam looks away again. “Hey.”

Donna struggles to keep her voice steady. “Can I come in?”

Cameron nods, opening the door wider. Donna steps over the trailer’s threshold, takes a deep breath, and wonders how this conversation is going to go. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the angst continues . . . 
> 
> (We seem to have hit 100,000 words with this update. Geez!)


	30. Chapter 30

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein a meal is consumed and an imagined milestone is attained in an unsatisfying manner.

Once inside the Airstream, Donna first focuses on the sheer chaos of the place. It looks as though a hurricane had swept through the small living quarters just moments ago: clothes are all over the floor; empty bags of Cheetos and bottles of orange soda are everywhere; scraps of paper with scribbled bits of code are spilling off of Cam’s computer desk. The second thing Donna notices is Cameron, who if anything looks worse than the Airstream. She’s pale, her t-shirt has a dollop of peanut butter stuck to the shoulder, and when she finally glances up, Donna can see that her eyes are red-rimmed and puffy.

Donna is the first to break the awkward silence. “You haven’t been at work this week.” Donna shakes her head inwardly; what a stupid thing to say, given everything else that’s going on. But instinctively, and as always, talking about work feels easier than talking about everything that the two of them really need to hash out.

Cameron looks a little relieved at Donna’s opening gambit. “Yeah. I’ve been working here. I kind of had a good idea for the Billy Joel livestream, and I wanted to run with it.”

Donna doesn’t say anything to that. She has no doubt that Cameron has been working, because the day Cam can’t work is the day she stops breathing. One of those shots of almost unbearable tenderness that sometimes assault her hits Donna now, and she has to struggle not hug Cameron tightly and just let everything else drift away. Since she knows that wouldn’t solve anything in the long run, Donna does the next best thing: she turns toward the little kitchen area and starts rummaging through the cabinets.

That act seems to startle Cameron. “What . . . what are you doing?”

“Looking for something for us to eat,” Donna says, grateful for the chore that she’s assigned herself. “There’s not a whole lot here to work with.” She pokes her head into the refrigerator. Eggs, and milk that actually seems to be on the right side of the expiration date. Good. She finds a box of pancake mix in one of the cabinets. Even better.

Donna turns and sees that Cam is staring at her. “You’re going to cook something?”

Donna shrugs, knowing that a normal domestic evening is probably the last thing that either one of them expected, but also knowing that they both probably need the distraction and the food itself. “You haven’t been eating real food lately.” It’s a statement, not a question, and Donna doesn’t need to see Cam’s slow nod to know that it’s true. Donna has only forced herself to eat normal meals when Haley is there with her, and Cam hasn’t had a Haley in her trailer to make her do the same.

Donna busies herself with mixing up pancake batter and scrambling eggs, taking comfort in the ordinariness of the actions and the familiar smell of the food itself.When everything is finished, she locates a couple of plates and forks, dishes out the meal, and hands one plate to Cameron. “Breakfast for dinner,” Donna says, smiling a little wistfully.

Cam is apparently trying to smile back, but she can’t seem to turn up the corners of her mouth properly. “Donna . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

Donna interrupts her. “Just eat. We can talk after that.” Right now that odd, inappropriately mothering instinct is so strong in Donna that all she wants to do is somehow _take care_ of Cameron, and the only way to do that right now seems to be through food. She wonders at her own feelings. She ought to be angry, she thinks. After all, Cam left without a word, leaving Donna completely alone, bewildered, and bereft. But somehow, for some reason, she’s just about as far from anger as it’s possible to be.

Cam takes her plate and sits on her bed with it. Obediently swallowing her eggs and pancakes, first tentatively and then with a little more enthusiasm, Cameron doesn’t say anything else. Donna takes her own plate and silently chews and swallows as well, wishing for maple syrup but thinking that, even so, this particular meal tastes better to her than anything else that she’s eaten all week. She relaxes just a fraction, studying Cameron out of the corner of her eye.

When Cameron finishes, she’s able to look at Donna and manage a weak smile. “Thanks for this.” Cam starts to say something else but then stops herself.

Donna sighs, puts her empty plate aside, and goes to sit next to Cameron on the bed. Neither of them says anything for a moment, and then Donna feels Cam’s hand in hers. “I’m sorry.” Cam’s voice is low, but Donna hears her clearly. She rubs her thumb against Cameron’s knuckles, feeling their sharpness, not knowing exactly what she wants to say right now.

Cam’s hold on Donna’s hand tightens just a fraction. “I never should have . . . I can’t believe I brought up Mutiny. I don’t even feel that way, not anymore. I haven’t for a long time.”

Donna nods; she knows that what Cameron is saying is true on some level, but she also knows that it isn’t the whole story. She feels a tightness in her chest and throat, but she knows that she has to respond. “Cam . . . it’s always going to be there. We can’t pretend that it isn’t.” There’s a heaviness to her words, but she manages to get them out.

The expression on Cameron’s face right now is some combination of misery and acknowledgment. “We got past that a long time ago. We’re different people now.”

“We are, but of course we aren’t, not really. It’s always going to be a kind of power that you have over me, if you ever want to use it. I mean, it’s not that I don’t deserve it.” Donna breaks off, suddenly unable to say anything else.

Cam looks near tears as well. “Donna . . .” She can’t seem to finish the sentence.

Donna squeezes Cameron’s hand, which is still entwined in her own. “Look, we just can’t hurt each other, no matter what else is happening. It’s too easy for us to do that, given . . . well, everything we’ve been through. We shouldn’t give in to that, not ever.” She falls silent, thinking about how much she and Gordon hurt each other, the things they said to each other as their marriage slowed to its finish and finally cracked apart. Not for the first time, she wishes it had been different.

Donna sees that Cameron is looking right at her now. “I never want to hurt you. It was just . . .” Cam looks away and doesn’t finish the sentence.

Donna takes Cameron’s hand again, gently. “You felt attacked, so you attacked back. I get it.” She _does_ get it, of course, but she wishes that Cam could just talk to her about whatever’s going on in her head right now.

Cam doesn’t answer for a couple of beats. When she does, her voice is barely audible. “I’m screwing everything up.”

Because she can't stop herself, Donna puts her arms around Cameron, holding her tightly. “You’re not doing that. Things aren’t always supposed to be easy.” Donna sounds comforting and confident, and she hopes like hell that she’s not lying to both of them.

Still in the embrace, Cameron twists around to look at Donna. “But you’re right. I _do_ blow up things. I did it with Tom, and I did it with Joe. When it started to fall apart with them, I just . . . let it. I _made_ it, even. How do I know that I won’t do it again?” Cam’s voice is plaintive, hoping for a reassurance that she knows Donna really can’t provide.

Donna strokes Cameron’s hair and doesn’t answer, because her throat is too tight and because she just doesn’t know what to say. How do either of them know what’s going to happen in the future? Life and relationships are precarious and precious, and to pretend otherwise is just disingenuous.

Cam takes a deep breath before her next sentence. “Are you . . . going to stay here tonight?”

Donna hesitates. “Do you want me to do that?”

Cameron’s hold on Donna’s hand tightens. “Yeah.”

Donna’s heart fills with something warm, and she kisses Cameron on the forehead. “Then I will.”

 

**§§§**

Later, as they’re lying together on narrow Airstream bed, as they have so many times in the past, Donna thinks about how Cam still hasn’t really told her about whatever is troubling her: she never mentioned her nightmare, or whatever caused her meltdown in the pinball arcade, or why she pulled away from Donna during _Clueless_. Donna tries not to dwell on that, tries to convince herself that Cam has already opened up to her more than she usually does. Still, if Donna is being honest with herself, she knows that there’s a lot more going on, that Cam’s self-sabotage worries are important, but they’re almost certainly not the fundamental thing itself.

Suddenly, Cam’s voice breaks abruptly into her thoughts. “I love you.”

Stunned, Donna can’t answer for a moment as a peculiar wave of sadness washes through her. “I love you, too. This isn’t how I imagined that we’d tell each other that.” Cam puts her arms around Donna, pulling her close, and Donna shuts her eyes, trying to force back the tears that insist on spilling over.

After a few moments, Cameron speaks again. “But what if . . . what if that isn’t . . .” She can’t seem to go on.

Knowing exactly what Cam is trying to convey, Donna finishes her sentence. “What is if it isn’t enough?”

Cameron nods, and Donna feels the heaviness of a dread that seems to fill every part of her. “I don’t know, Cam.” It’s an honest answer, but it’s not one that either she or Cam wants to hear.

Over the five months of their relationship, Donna has gotten used to the fact that Cameron like her own space in bed; she usually sleeps without touching Donna, whatever else they might have been doing before.But that night, Cameron burrows into her as though she’s drowning and Donna is the only lifeboat available in a vast ocean. Donna lies awake most of the night, holding Cameron and watching the darkness outside of the little window above the bed fade softly into grey. She has no doubt at all about the power and depth of Cameron’s feelings, and how much she wants things to work out with the two of them. But neither of them, indeed, can predict whether all the love in the world will be enough; all they will be able to do, Donna knows, is to wait, and try, and hope.

 

**§§§**

When Donna opens her eyes early the next morning—she thinks she dropped off to sleep sometime just after dawn—she sees that Cameron is still sleeping. Asleep, Cam looks younger than she had appeared yesterday, the lines of anxiety and fear that were in her face smoothed out, at least temporarily. Donna finds that she can’t stop looking at her. _I do love you too_ , she thinks.

Donna has been waiting and hoping for an _I love you_ from Cameron for a long time, almost from the very beginning of everything. It’s not, she thinks, that she needs the affirmation. Even at her most insecure, Donna has never doubted that Cam _does_ love her: it’s been obvious in her every word and every action. Regardless of how hard it is for Cameron to utter emotionally personal things out loud, it’s equally impossible for her to hide them. Bos is right: love just spills out of Cameron, whether she wants it to or not. Despite all that, Donna had longed for the ritual of the verbal exchange, for no particular reason other than the fact that it’s one of the classic landmarks in a relationship. Yet this _I love you_ from Cameron seems to have made Donna feel more hollow than sated. Cameron had meant it, of course, but Donna also can’t stop herself from realizing that some part of Cam said it as a consolation prize, to keep from talking about something that’s even more difficult to say.

At this moment, Cameron opens her eyes and looks up at Donna. Donna smiles at her, but she sees that Cameron is picking up on her undeniable melancholy immediately. Whatever closeness they had both felt last night, the problematic thing between them hasn’t entirely been fixed, and both of them know it.

Cameron looks over at Donna and takes a long breath. “I’m sorry I’m making everything so crappy for you. It’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted . . . I want everything to be awesome.”

Donna looks at her sadly. “Yeah, I know. That’s what we all want.” She takes Cameron’s hand and doesn’t say anything else.

Cam isn’t looking at her now. “Can we just . . . start over? I mean, it _was_ awesome, up until now. We can make it that way again.” Her voice is pleading.

Everything inside of Donna wants to agree, to say _yes, please, yes let’s start over._ But she remembers saying much the same thing to Cameron years ago, after Cam found out that Donna had lied about Diane’s reaction to the idea of firing Doug and Craig. They had agreed to start over, and just a few days later, their entire world imploded. There is no starting over, Donna knows now, not really. There’s only moving forward with what they have.

“Cam, whatever this is . . . it’s not going away just because we want it to. That’s just not how it can work, not for real, not for long.” Donna tries to keep her voice steady, and she mostly succeeds.

Cam nods, turning away and staring at the wall instead of at Donna. “I know. I don’t know why it’s so hard.”

Donna doesn’t know why it is, either. “I think . . . I think you still need to figure it out.”

Cam looks as though she’s about to burst into tears. “Donna . . . I don’t want . . .”

Donna kisses her softly. “Look, I’m just going to go back home now. It’s going to be ok. You can come when you’re ready.” As before, Donna sounds comforting and confident, but she’s shaking inwardly. What if Cam is never ready? What if . . . But Donna pushes that thought away. This is yet another leap, and so far, through everything, whenever she’s jumped, Cam has always been there to catch her in the end. There’s nothing else that she can do other than trust Cam to come back to her eventually, ready to talk and to trust. It’s going to happen because it _has_ to happen.

Cam nods and doesn’t say anything, because there’s just nothing really left to say right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, it isn't over yet. Sorry, guys!
> 
> I wanted to stay inside Donna's mind for this extra chapter, but the next two will both be Cameron POVs.


	31. Chapter 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron receives advice and makes a decision.

After Donna leaves, Cameron goes back to bed and wraps herself in her blanket. Despite the mildness of the morning, she’s suddenly freezing; the brief warm feeling that had arrived with Donna is gone, leaving her empty and cold. Cam stays cocooned for the next several hours, dozing and trying not to think about what a mess everything still is.

At some point, in a liminal state between awareness and sleep, Cameron senses rather than hears the unmistakable _ping_ of a video game that she knows shouldn’t be in the Airstream at all. And then, a familiar voice is resonating inside of her head

_"So this is the Airstream. It’s, um, homey. All set up and ready for entertaining drop-ins like me. Martha Stewart would be proud.” Gordon is snickering at her, the steady sound of the game providing a comforting backdrop to the encounter._

_Cameron is less surprised than she probably ought to be; for some reason, Gordon’s presence feels perfectly natural. “Yeah, well, it’s not like you gave me any warning. I_ do _clean up sometimes, especially if know people are going to come by. What are you doing here, anyway?”_

_Gordon pauses the game, and Cameron can feel the force of his full attention. “You tell me. You’re the one who controls this thing, after all. If I’m here, I’m here because of you.”_

_“Are you . . . going to kill me with a shovel?” It’s a joke of sorts, but it’s one that fails spectacularly as Cameron hears her voice—or whatever it is that she might be communicating with—ending with a quiver._

_“Now why would I be here to do that?” Cam can tell that Gordon knows exactly what she’s talking about, but he wants her to be the one to say it. Dammit, even her dream creations insist on pushing and prodding and getting her to confess things that she’d be much more comfortable leaving unsaid._

_“I . . . hurt her.” Cam can barely get it out. She hurt Donna, and then she bailed even though that’s the very first thing Joanie had asked her to promise that she wouldn’t do. At the time, Cam had never imagined that anything like this could ever happen, and yet, here they are._

_Cam feels Gordon’s voice sounding soft, comforting—much softer and more comforting than she probably deserves. “You get at least one pass. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t screw up with Donna a million times myself. Besides, if we’re being totally honest, I really don’t know how to find a shovel around here. I haven’t seen a hardware store or anything like that. It’s mostly all video arcades and Radio Shacks on steroids, as far as I can tell.”_

_Cameron doesn’t smile, wonders if she’s ever going to smile again. “I kind of feel like killing myself with a shovel, so it’s probably good that there isn’t one around. I . . . suck.”_

_Gordon snorts. “Ok, stop it with that. We all suck. I’m only around for a little while this time, so I have togive you the great advice right away.” He stops talking and the game starts pinging again._

_Cam is starting to feel a little impatient. “Ok, so do it. What’s the great advice?”_

_“The right thing is always hard.” It comes out in a voice sounding deeper than Gordon’s, almost echoing inside of Cameron’s head._

_“The right thing is always hard? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Cameron is irritated both by Gordon and by the apparent pointlessness of this dream. If she’d wanted trite fortune cookie wisdom, she’d have ordered herself some takeout._

Gordon doesn’t respond, and Cameron realizes that the pinging has ceased as well; she is alone in the Airstream once again. As she drifts back into the quiet loneliness of sleep, her mind works on Gordon’s odd statement, simultaneously thinking it over and trying to ignore its obvious implications.

 

**§§§**

It’s early afternoon when Cameron finally pulls herself back into consciousness. She wakes with a need for a connection with someone real, someone alive, someone who might have a chance of giving her some comprehensible help, point her in a useful direction. Maybe Bos? But the thought barely flits through her mind before she discards it. Cam is still amazed and touched at just how accepting Bos has been of her relationship with Donna, but she can’t really imagine going to him with this. It would just be . . . too weird. Talking to Joanie or Haley would be even weirder, and in any case Cam can’t bear the thought of telling either of them about how she’s somehow managed to ruin the best thing that she’s ever had, hurting their mother in the process. They’d be rightly furious, and she can’t face either one of them until she makes this right.

Before she fully realizes what she’s about to do, Cameron is reaching for the phone and dialing Joe’s number. He answers almost immediately, as if he has been sitting by the phone waiting to hear from her.

“Hello?”

Every time she calls Joe—which isn’t terribly often—Cam is startled at how familiar his voice sounds, how familiar everything always seems, when both of their lives are so radically different from the way it had been when they were together. “Hey. It’s . . . Cam.” Familiar or not, she feels awkward right now.

“Hey. It’s great to hear from you.” Joe’s tone is genuinely warm and friendly, and Cameron feels a wave of emotion at the sound of it. She hadn’t quite realized just how much she needs to talk to someone who actually cares about her, but she’s feeling it keenly now.

“I thought you might be in class.” In point of fact, Cameron hadn’t done any thinking at all before she called, but she suddenly wants to slow down the conversation a little before she is forced to hear herself blurt out whatever might choose to come out of her mouth.

“Well, it’s Saturday, even in Armonk.” Joe sounds amused, and Cam realizes how much of a blur this whole week has been, a week in which time has ceased to have any real meaning at all. She feels a little foolish, but since she can’t very well hang up and abort, she takes a breath and keeps going.

“How’s Brian doing?” It’s small talk, and Cameron is terrible at small talk under the best of circumstances, circumstances in which her entire life isn’t crumbling before her eyes. But still, she actually _does_ sort of want to know about Brian. She tries and fails to picture what their life might be like, Joe and Brian the Latin teacher, who did seem like a nice enough guy when she met him a couple of months ago.Do they live in an apartment or a house? Who cooks? Does Brian do the dishes the way Joe likes to have them done? Cam wonders if Joe ever thinks about her life with Donna, if he has just as much trouble imagining the two of them as a couple.

“Brian’s great. He actually just won a statewide prize for excellence in teaching. It’s pretty prestigious.” Cam lets Joe’s voice wash over her, only half paying attention but somehow managing to _mmm_ appreciatively in the right places. Joe is still Joe, even as a teacher, she thinks to herself, relishing the professional success of his partner. He always had been just as proud of her work as he seems to be of Brian’s.

After awhile, Cameron is suddenly aware that Joe has stopped talking, and that the phone has been silent for longer than it probably should have been. She shifts, a little uncomfortable.

“What’s the matter, Cameron?” Joe asks the question gently, and Cam braces herself for the real point of this phone call. Yet right now, she seems to be having trouble forming any words at all. What the hell is wrong with her?

When Cameron doesn’t say anything for several long moments, Joe speaks again. “It’s Donna, isn’t it?”

His tone is carefully neutral, as though he’s trying hard to keep from sounding critical. Cam surmises that, even though Joe’s opinion of Donna has been steadily softening, he’s probably still half-convinced that she can’t really be trusted, that she’ll hurt Cameron in the end regardless of any sincerely good intentions on her part. Cam finds herself bristling inwardly at the unfairness of what the Joe in her imagination is thinking. Cam’s the one doing the hurting this time, and Donna is the victim of it. Imaginary Joe has no right at all to attack Donna like that.

Knowing that she has to respond with some actual words, Cameron shakes off these thoughts and focuses on Joe’s question. “Yeah . . . yes. But it’s sort of . . . complicated.”

Joe laughs softly. “It usually is. However much you want to talk about it, I’m here.” Cam hears a rustling sound, as if Joe is settling down for a potentially long conversation.

“It’s just . . .” _It’s just what?_ Then, in a burst, something completely unexpected comes out of Cameron’s mouth. “What went wrong with us? I mean, why is it working with you and Brian, and it didn’t work with you and me?” Cameron is horrified. Why did she say that? And what does it have to do with her problem with Donna, which, after all, is the reason she’s calling Joe in the first place?

If Joe is startled by the question, he covers it smoothly.“There’s no single thing, Cam; you know that. And if you want to use my relationship with Brian as some sort of treasure map for your relationship with Donna, well, that can’t really work either.” Joe’s tone is still kind, but it’s also a fraction cooler than it had been before.

Cameron is a little stung by this. Treasure map? That’s not what she wants, or at least, she doesn’t think it’s that. “That’s not it. I just . . . I want things to work out, this time.” It’s lame, but it’s as close to the truth as Cam can formulate right now. If she knows what went wrong with Joe, maybe, _maybe_ she can keep the same thing from happening with Donna.

Joe hesitates. “Can I tell you something?”

Cameron bites her lip, wondering what might be coming. “Ok.”

“I’m . . . in therapy. I’ve been in therapy for a couple of years. Ever since . . . “ He breaks off, sounding a little embarrassed.

Ever since I wrecked your life, Cam thinks. She’s stunned by Joe’s revelation. “Wow. Is it . . . I mean, how has it been?” She can’t imagine Joe in therapy, lying on a couch, talking about his feelings. Actually, though, maybe she _can_ imagine it. She suddenly wonders if that’s something that Joe might really have wanted all along.

“It’s been . . . good, working on myself. It’s something that I probably should have done years ago.” Joe’s voice is careful, vulnerable.

Trying to lighten the tone of this increasingly serious conversation, Cam attempts a joke. “I’m sure I come off great in your sessions. I hope it’s been entertaining, at least.” When Joe doesn’t respond at first, Cameron winces. Her jokes all seem to be falling flat today.

“I wouldn’t say that any of it is entertaining, but you come off fine,” Joe finally answers. “It’s more about how I felt about you, than it is about you yourself. And, of course, there’s a whole lot that isn’t about you at all. Not everything is, you know.” Cam can see Joe’s smile in her mind’s eye, and she relaxes a little.

“So . . . what do you talk about? I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but . . . “ Cam wonders just how much she _does_ want to know about these sessions of Joe’s. Whatever he says, she can’t help feeling that a whole lot of them had to be talking about what an asshole she had been to him.

Joe pauses for a moment before answering her. “A lot of it has to do with my father, and how angry I’ve always been at him. My therapist had me try an exercise where I actually have conversations with my dad, telling him all the things that I never told him when he was alive. it sounds a little out there, I know, but it really helped me get past some of that baggage.”

Cam thinks about this, wonders how it would be to have a chat with a conjured-up figment of her own father. She finds the idea slightly ridiculous. “Do you talk about other stuff, too?”

Joe laughs a little. “We’ve covered a lot of ground in the two years that I’ve been going there, so yeah. The point I wanted to make, getting back to you and me, and me and Brian, is that I don’t just talk about these things with my therapist—I talk about them with Brian too. We’re able to tell each other some of the dark stuff, and we, I don’t know, help each other heal.”

Cameron remembers how Joe almost never talked to her about his childhood, how he made up story after story to explain those scars on his chest, how she never could be entirely sure that any version of what he said was the actual, factual truth of what had happened to him. Then again, she had never told him much about her life before they met, either. The two of them were always focused on the future, and the past was something that both of them would rather ignore than confront.

“That’s great, but . . . I don’t think people should need to tell each other everything, even if they’re in a relationship. I mean, you have to keep some things private, don’t you? And you and I talked. We just didn’t talk about stuff that we can’t change, anyway.” Cam hears herself sounding unreasonably defensive, and she’s not totally certain if she’s arguing with Joe or with herself.

“Actually, you and I mostly talked about work. There’s nothing wrong with that; work is important to both of us, and that’s always been one of the connections that we have. But I don’t think it can be the main thing, or the only thing, at least not for me. It’s one of the reasons why I decided I had to get out of tech and do something really different with my life.” Cameron wonders why Joe sounds a little sad, especially when he clearly loves his new life.

“I . . . don’t know what to say to any of that,” Cam says, thinking that it might be her most honest sentence of this entire conversation. She suddenly remembers Tom, who had pushed her to talk about her childhood more than Joe had.She’d managed to tell Tom some things, but nothing really difficult, and soon enough he stopped asking for more.

Cam hears a sigh coming from Joe’s end of the telephone. “Look, I know that you trust Donna, and I’ve come to see that she probably deserves that trust. You’re right; people don’t have to hear everything. There are things that I haven’t told Brian, that I’ll probably never tell anyone. But if you love someone enough to want to make a life with them, you have to talk about some of what’s so deep inside you that you don’t even want to whisper it to yourself when you’re alone at night. Anyway, that’s the conclusion that I’ve come to over the last two years. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s really been worth it.”

“You sound really together,” Cam says, thinking about how surprising that is. After everything, after Ryan’s death, and then Gordon’s, after the failure of their relationship, Joe had to overcome a lot to get to where he is right how. She’s really glad that he’s ended up in such a good place after everything that he’s been through.

Joe laughs.”Yeah, well, therapy. It actually works.”

Cam grimaces. “It’s not for me.”

“Maybe not, but we all have to figure out how to move out of our cycles. I hope you and Donna can do that together.”

Cameron hopes that too, hopes it more than she hopes anything else. “Thanks, Joe. You’ve been . . . really great. I’ll talk to you again soon.”

 

**§§§**

After they hang up, Cameron feels suddenly alone again. The Airstream is too quiet, and she decides to do some work to postpone confronting Joe’s advice for a couple of hours. Right now she needs to test some of the coding for the pre-show for next month’s livestreamed Billy Joel concert, which means that she’s unfortunately going to have to listen to Billy Joel. She sighs. Even insipid pop is probably better than silence right now, although not a whole lot better.

Cam idly clicks through the various songs hosted on the site, making certain that everything loads quickly and plays smoothly, adjusting code slightly when necessary. The live Billy Joel concert is going to be big for MusicLand, and they’ve seen a noticeable bump in subscribers just because of it. But Cameron can’t keep from rolling her eyes as she’s forced to listen to the music. “Uptown Girl”? “The Longest Time”? “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”? Who listens to this stuff when they’re not being paid to do it?

After confirming the functionality of at least a dozen songs, Cameron comes to one that she doesn’t think she’s ever heard before: ["And So It Goes."](http://www.heatherweb.com/stuff/fade/andsoitgoes.mp3) As she clicks on it, the simple poetic melody and its accompanying piano backdrop fill the trailer:

 _In every heart there is a room_  
_A sanctuary safe and strong_  
_To heal the wounds from lovers past_  
_Until a new one comes along_  
  
_I spoke to you in cautious tones_  
_You answered me with no pretense._  
_And still I feel I said too much  
_ _My silence is my self defense._

 _And every time I've held a rose_  
_It seems I only felt the thorns._  
_And so it goes, and so it goes  
_ _And so will you soon I suppose._

 _But if my silence made you leave_  
_Then that would be my worst mistake._  
_So I will share this room with you  
_ _And you can have this heart to break._

Cameron sits transfixed long after the song ends, the lyrics reverberating in her head. She isn’t aware that she’s crying until she realizes that the notes next to her computer are becoming peculiarly smudged. In a rush of feelings, everything suddenly seems clear in a way that it hasn’t been since she started having the dream about her father. Finally, she knows exactly what she’s going to do.

_(The right thing is always hard.)_

She has to tell Donna about her father. No, she _wants_ to tell Donna about her father. She wants to tell Donna . . . everything. She wants to spend the rest of her life telling things to Donna that she’s never told anyone else. She needs to give Donna her heart, totally and completely, in a way that she’s never done with anyone else before. Falling in love with Donna wasn’t the biggest leap; _this_ is the biggest leap. It’s everything, and she realizes that it’s exactly what Joe had been trying to tell her.

Cam wonders why it had to be fucking Billy Joel that was the tipping point, and why it has taken her so long to reach this certainty.(What would have happened, she wonders, if Donna’s idea had been about, say, digital cash registers? Would she have still been able to have these epiphanies without all of these musical catalysts?) Now that she’s here, however, she doesn’t want to waste another second. She practically runs out of the Airstream, jumps into her truck, and drives as fast as it’s possible to drive without being arrested. Cameron’s heart is so full, her mind so occupied with what she’s about to do and say, that it seems to be only moments later that she’s approaching the front door of Donna’s house. She hesitates there briefly, wondering if her weeklong absence has changed her status. Can she just use her key? Should she knock? While she’s pondering, the door suddenly opens, and it’s Donna. Cam doesn’t think she’s ever been so glad to see someone in her entire life.

Cameron answers the question that she sees in Donna’s luminous eyes by nodding. Those eyes fill with tears, and Donna reaches out to hug Cameron tightly. Cam presses her head into Donna’s shoulder and breathes, feeling a rush of joy and freedom so powerful and deep that it seems impossible that it’s real. She knows that a difficult conversation lies ahead, but right now, at this particular moment, everything that was wrong is finally right in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, *this* is more like it! I need these two to get back on track! (And I agree with Cameron: if Donna had thought of creating a company around the idea of a digital cash register, the story arcs in this fic would have been a lot more difficult to pull off!)


	32. Chapter 32

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron explains.

Once they’ve settled on the living room couch, once Donna is looking at her expectantly, Cameron feels a flash of fear. Can she really do this? She takes a sip of the glass of wine that has somehow materialized on the coffee table in front of her, breathes deeply, and plunges in.

“I just. . . there’s some stuff I want to tell you, but I’m not sure how to get going. I mean, every time I think about where to start, it seems like I need to go back a little more.” Cam shakes her head, irritated with herself. Why is she making this into such a drama? Maybe it’s all ridiculous. Donna certainly has better things to do than listen to Cameron stammering about events that have been dead and buried for years.

Donna, however, is giving Cameron a look that is as far from impatience as any look could possibly be. “Whatever you want to say, however long you want to take to say it . . . I’m here.” Cameron feels Donna’s hand in her own, and she closes her eyes for a moment at the touch. For a split second, she wishes they could just stay like this, but she knows she has to move forward. Cam tries to conjure up the utter certainty that she felt when she heard “And So It Goes,” but right now she feels anything but confident. She takes another deep breath and opens her eyes. The right thing is always hard.

“So, ok, it’s like this. The first thing you need to know is that I was a weird kid. I mean . . . really weird. I didn’t really have any friends at all before my father died, mostly because I just wasn’t interested in any of the typical girl stuff. I never wanted to wear dresses, or play with dolls, or anything like that. I just wanted to help my father fix his motorcycle, and all I ever wanted to wear were the same jeans and t-shirts that he did.” Cam breaks off here, thinking about those days, remembering how important she had felt when she handed her father the tools that he needed for whatever job he happened to be doing at the time.

As Cameron falls silent, she feels Donna’s hand squeezing her own. “I was like that too, but I probably hid it more than you did. I wasn’t interested in typical girl things either, but I didn’t want my parents to know that about me. I just pretended to be what they thought I was. I think I’m still doing that, in a way. You’re . . . you’ve always been a lot more honest than I ever could be.”

Cam smiles absently at the compliment, but she knows that the whole thing is a lot more complicated than that. “My mother . . . well, she just didn’t get me. I think she imagined having a daughter who liked what she liked, someone who would bond with her over, I don’t know, lipstick colors and whatever.” Cam hesitates, and then continues. “They fought about me a lot. They tried not to do it where I could hear, but I always knew what they were saying.”

“What exactly were they fighting about?” Donna is looking at Cameron intently, her eyes filled with an emotion that Cameron can’t quite identify.

Cam shrugs. “Oh, you know. Mostly about how my mother kept wanting to make me wear dresses and stop doing stuff that she thought were just for boys, and how my father thought I was fine. It wasn’t a big deal.”

The emotion in Donna’s eyes settles into anger, but Cam knows that it isn’t directed at her. “It sounds like a pretty big deal to me.”

Cam sighs. One reason she hates talking about her childhood is that it always makes her feel as though she’s whining about nothing at all. I mean, nobody _beat_ her or anything. Jesus. She wishes that she could just shrug it all off, the way she’s pretty sure that most people would have been able to do.

“Well, anyway, you’ve met my mother—you know how she is, and she’s always been like that. Life is a giant beauty contest to her.” Cam smiles a little, and Donna smiles back, but the anger is still in her eyes.

Cameron takes a breath and continues, glad that Donna’s fingers are still entwined in her own. “So, my father always . . . I just thought that he was the only person I had who _didn’t_ think I was this oddball, who just kind of saw me and . . . loved me anyway.” Cam’s voice cracks, and she can’t go on for a moment. Donna doesn’t say anything in response, but her fingers trace the back of Cameron’shand gently.

“He died a week before he was supposed to come home. I was literally counting the days—I had this stupid calendar, and every night before I went to bed I crossed off a date. My mother and I didn’t agree on much, but we both couldn’t wait for my dad to come back. I remember when these guys in uniforms came to our house to tell my mom; it was a Saturday, so I was home from school. She just started screaming, and I . . . I knew, even before anyone told me.” Cameron breaks off, remembering that scene, one that she always tries as hard as she can never to relive.

When Cam glances over, she sees that Donna’s eyes are filled with tears. Cameron gives her a rueful look. “You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this, why it matters at all now.”

Donna touches Cam’s cheek. “I’m not wondering that.”

Cameron closes her eyes, wondering how she was going to get through all of this. “After that, well, my mother just sort of fell apart. She mostly stayed in bed for—God, I don’t know, it seemed like forever. She started drinking then, too, sometimes a lot. I was just sort of on my own.” Cam pauses, remembering those months. She had never felt so entirely alone in her life as she had felt then.

Donna puts her arms around Cameron, holding her close. “You told me a little about this before, when you had the flu last year. Remember?” Her voice is choked, and the emotion behind it gives Cam just enough strength to continue.

“Anyway, my mother was . . . bad . . . for a long time. She got better after she met Len, for awhile anyway. I kind of see now that Len was probably good for her, and that he’s a pretty decent guy, but I just sort of hated him, because he wasn’t my dad and never could be. There was also this whole thing with Len’s daughter Nancy. She didn’t live with us but she was always around, and she and my mom just clicked. Nancy and I couldn’t stand each other—I guess we still can’t—but Nancy was everything my mom had always wanted in a daughter.”

Cam catches Donna’s eye and sees that she’s smiling. “Your mother’s taste in daughters is . . . questionable.”

Cameron laughs softly at that. “Yeah, well, I guess it’s too bad that we had to be so different. It’s cool.” It’s not, of course, cool at all, and Donna clearly knows that it isn’t.

“Cam . . .” Donna trails off, obviously not knowing what to say. This time Cameron takes Donna’s hand, thinking how lucky she is that somehow she apparently didn’t ruin everything permanently. Donna is still here, next to her, right now. It can all still be ok.

“So, the thing is, during all that time, all those years—even though I didn’t have my dad, I remembered him. I _felt_ him. Jesus, I know how dumb that sounds, but it got me through junior high and high school, when I didn’t really have anyone else. I’d think about the stuff we used to do together, and I’d remember how, well, _safe_ he always made me feel.” Cam is remembering that safe feeling right now, in fact; since her father, only Donna, she realizes, has been able to make her feel protected and loved in that particular way.

Donna brushes Cam’s cheek with two of her fingers. “It’s good that you had that.”

Cam nods. “Yeah, it was. I thought about him every day. Every time something went wrong in my life, I’d hang onto that dumb stuffed raccoon that he made me. It always made me feel better, even when I was way too old for stuffed animals.” Cameron briefly wishes that she hadn’t hurled that raccoon out of the Airstream. She could use it right now.

Donna has a peculiar expression on her face. “I remember seeing that raccoon for the first time when you lost the BIOS code. You just looked so . . . devastated.”

Cam smiles. “Well, I was. That’s why I was so awful to you that day. Sorry about that, by the way.”

Donna smiles back. “I _think_ we’ve gotten past that whole thing by now.”

Cameron sighs. “Yeah. But the thing about all this—the reason I’m telling you about my father at all—is that I started having a dream about him right after Joe visited, and it kind of freaked me out.” Cam stops, not sure that she can go through with this part. Dammit, why is this so difficult for her? What’s the difference if Donna knows that her dad said . . . that he thought . . .

Donna shifts a little but doesn’t say anything, and Cameron knows that she has to get this out. She closes her eyes so she won’t have to see Donna’s expression. “At first it was just a weird dream about driving somewhere with my parents, when I was about five. And then I heard them arguing about something, but I didn’t know what it was. But after we saw that movie _Philadelphia_ , it all came back to me. It was actually something that happened, not just a dream at all.”

Cam feels herself starting to tremble, and Donna pulls Cameron even closer to her. Cam curls up on the couch and puts her head on Donna’s lap, all at once feeling like the child she had been in the memory. They stay like that for a few moments before Cameron is able to continue.

“We were at this picnic in some park that I’d been looking forward to, just my mom and my dad and me. But all of a sudden, I heard my dad say . . . he said . . . ‘fucking faggots.’ I looked over, and I saw these two guys holding hands. Anyway, he made us leave, and my parents fought about it in the car. He told her that I . . . . I didn’t need to see that shit.” Cam buries her head in Donna’s lap and doesn’t look at her. It’s done.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Cameron starts to cry, and not in the single sob or eyes-filling-with-tears way that she usually cries. This crying is loud, and embarrassing, and wracks through her body. She struggles mightily to stop. Fuck, this is so stupid! What is there to cry about, as if she’s still five years old? But then she feels Donna holding her, talking to her, stroking her. “You don’t have to fight it. Just . . . don’t.”

And, since she apparently can’t do anything else, Cameron doesn’t. She sobs for what feels like hours, sobs until she literally seems to run out of tears. And through it all, there’s Donna, somehow making her feel a little less stupidly helpless.

When Cameron is finally quiet, she rolls over and looks up at Donna. “I . . . I hate him.” Cam can’t believe what she has just heard come out of her mouth. Where did that come from? Whatever her father might have done or thought or said, she doesn’t _hate_ him! How could she hate someone that she loved more than anyone in the world? Cam feels a fresh bout of tears coming on, and she slaps at her eyes angrily. Enough is enough.

“It’s ok to hate him. It doesn’t mean that you don’t love him.” Donna is looking a little sad as she says this. Exhausted and confused, Cam looks up into Donna’s eyes.

Donna takes a breath. “Cam . . . do you think that what we’ve been doing is, well, wrong?”

“No!” Cameron isn’t certain of much, but she’s definitely certain of this. “It feels . . . nothing has seemed so right to me in a long, long time.” Not since . . . when? Cam actually can’t remember having felt so much _herself_ as she feels with Donna, since, well, since probably ever.

“That’s all that matters, really. We’re not our parents. We don’t have to think the way they do.” There’s a catch in Donna’s voice as she says this, and Cam wonders what might be going through Donna’s mind right now.

Cam tries to figure out what she herself is thinking, at least enough to form a coherent response. “I know that. It’s just . . . I think I always wanted him to be proud of me, and now, knowing that he never would have been . . .” The tears are threatening again, but at least she’s gotten most of it out.

Donna’s arm around Cameron tightens just a little. “Cam, your father died when you were only nine, when he was still, well, _perfect_. It wouldn’t have stayed like that forever. It _can’t_. There would have been a moment when you realized that he was a complicated human being, when you saw something about him that you didn’t like. That’s the way it always is with parents, but you never had that. You never had to let him be a person, like the rest of us are.”

Cameron considers this. “Maybe, but right now I just can’t seem to remember anything good about him without that stupid picnic getting in the way. It’s like I lost him all over again, but forever this time.” As she says this, Cam realizes just how true it is, and a wave of utter loneliness washes over her.

Donna is nodding. “I know. So . . . that arcade? That was why you . . .”

“Yeah,” Cam interrupts. “For some reason, thinking about how much my dad and I used to love arcades just made everything . . . I’m sorry. I know we should have had a good time that day.”

“No, _I’m_ sorry,” Donna is sounding near tears herself. “I’m sorry that happened to you, and I’m sorry you had to go through it alone.”

Cam sighs, wishing that she had been able to talk to Donna about this sooner. “When . . . when did it happen for you? When did you find out something about your parents that made them, well, _change_?”

Donna answers immediately, as though she doesn’t have to think about the question at all. “Junior high. I heard my father joking about a lazy Hispanic guy who worked for him, and I realized that he was being racist. My mother just laughed along with him.” Donna stops, apparently lost in thought.

“Did you . . . you know, do anything about it?” Cameron hopes that the question doesn’t sound accusatory.

Donna shrugs. “Sort of. It really bothered me, and I thought about it a lot. When I was a little older and things like that came up, I’d argue with them. Later on I just tried to ignore it. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, but I’ve never been great at fighting with them.”

“I wonder what I would have said to my dad.” Cam’s voice is low.

“Look, Cam . . . the thing is, you’re never going to know what would have happened if your father had known about us. Maybe you would have fought about it and then gradually gotten past it. Maybe learning that someone he really loved was gay would have made him see the whole thing in a different light right away. Maybe he never would have spoken to you again. You’ll never know, which means that you can’t get any closure about it, and that totally sucks.” Donna pauses for a moment, watching Cameron’s expression.

Cam realizes that Donna is right, and that this not-knowing is a large part of what’s eating her up about the memory. “Yeah, I hate that. I just wish I could talk to him, to see what he might have said. Even if it was the worst thing I can imagine, it might be better than wondering.”

Donna squeezes Cameron’s hand. “I know. But what I think you need to do is try to remember all of the ways that your father loved and supported you, and just have faith that it would have been enough.”

Something about what Donna has just said makes Cam feel a fraction better; maybe it _would_ have been enough. Maybe that one homophobic thing that her father said didn’t entirely define him. Maybe, _maybe_ he would have loved Cam so much that he could have accepted the idea of herself and Donna. Maybe she could have made him see why she loves Donna so much, and how good Donna is for her. Maybe she could have changed him.

Cam’s thoughts are interrupted by Donna. “Cam? I, um, I have something for you.” She gets up off the couch and walks into the bedroom. When she comes back, she’s holding something that makes Cameron’s heart stop for a moment.

Donna pushes the stuffed raccoon onto Cameron’s lap. “I found it outside the Airstream yesterday. I didn’t know why it was there, and I forgot about it when we talked last night. But . . . I think you should take it.”

Cameron bites her lip, not knowing what to say, startled at the rush of relief flooding her at the sight of the raccoon. “Thanks. I . . . I threw it away, but I’m glad to have it back.” Glad doesn’t begin to cover it, she thinks.

Donna smiles, pulling Cameron toward her. “Good.”

 

**§§§**

After a long time, after they talked more, and ate, and talked again, and fell asleep together in the big, comfortable bed that Cameron has missed so much, Cam opens her eyes and sees that the sky is slowly changing from black to grey. It’s dawn. And it’s Sunday, she thinks to herself, amazed that only a week has passed since she fled to the Airstream. It seems as though it’s been at least a lifetime.

She feels Donna stirring next to her, and she knows that she’s awake. “Hey,” Cam says.

Donna yawns and smiles. “Good morning. It’s a little early for you, isn’t it?”

Cameron, more alive than she’s been in weeks, feels a shot of energy. "Let's go watch the sunrise."

Donna looks puzzled. “The . . . sunrise?”

“Yeah. You said you like sunrises, remember?” Although she’d never admit it, Cameron had actually loved all of those goofy getting-to-know-your-girlfriend questions that Donna had lobbed at her when they first started dating. She remembers Donna’s answers to every single one.

Cam flings the blankets off. “Come on, get dressed. We can sit by the pool. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day.” Cameron hasn’t actually looked at a weather report, but she thinks that there’s absolutely no way that this day won’t, in fact, be beautiful.

And it _is_ beautiful, red and gold and filled with hope and promise. Cam doesn’t remember the last sunrise she saw—as she had told Donna, she definitely prefers sunsets to sunrises, if only because she usually hates getting up early for any reason. But this sunrise is different. This one really does feel like she’s getting a reboot, that she narrowly escaped something calamitous. Cam glances at Donna, who seems to be glowing as intensely as the sunrise itself. God, she’s beautiful.

Cam hesitates for an instant. “Hey Donna?”

“Hmmm?” Donna’s expression is dreamy and unfocused.

“When I told you I loved you . . . I meant it. But I kind of want to say it again, maybe do it better. I . . . I love you.” Cam flushes a little, but she’s pretty sure that the light is still murky enough that Donna won’t notice.

When Donna gives her a look that’s just about as happy as when Cameron first started to spin off ideas about Community so many years ago, Cam flushes even more. “I love you, too. I hear,” Donna lowers her voice, as if imparting something of great import and confidentiality, “that some people tell each other that more than once. It’s a thing.”

Cameron laughs, feeling incredibly light and free. “Really? Who are these people of whom you speak?”

Donna smiles as if she’ll never stop smiling, gets out of her chaise lounge, goes over to Cam’s, and kisses her long and softly. Cam kisses her back, and for a few moments there are no words at all. Then Cameron tries it out. “I love you. Yeah, you’re right. It actually can be done.”

Donna sighs happily. “Yeah, it can. And you managed to do it while watching a sunrise with me. You’re a romantic at heart, Cameron Howe.”

Cam snorts but privately feels that romance isn’t the worst thing in the world, at least if it’s with Donna. It might be the rush of adrenalin that comes with finally talking to Donna about her father, or it might be something else entirely. But whatever the case, she wouldn’t complain if this particular moment in her life went on and on forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of those chapters that means a lot to me. I hope you guys like it, too.


	33. Chapter 33

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein five things change and one thing remains the same.

After that night, after Donna learns more about Cameron’s past than she has in the entirety of the thirteen years that they have known each other, life doesn’t immediately return to the way it had been. Yet, even if it’s happening in fits and starts, there’s no doubt that their relationship has turned a corner, that everything is getting better rather than worse, and that’s more than enough for both of them right now. Donna is gentle and patient about the physical part of things, always letting Cameron initiate and taking pains to be as sensitive as possible. Although this sort of vigilance might have been expected to make sex difficult and awkward, it has the unexpected effect of bringing them even closer together.

Sometimes, lying in bed at night, Donna muses over some of the other changes, large and small, that have taken place over the summer of 1996. Off the top of her head, she counts at least five.

 

**1\. Gifts**

One evening in June after a long day at work, Donna notices a vase of lilies on the kitchen table. She stares at it, confused; she loves lilies, but she hadn’t bought these, and she has no idea how they got there.

At that moment, Haley comes into the kitchen to rummage through the refrigerator for a pre-dinner snack. ”Hey—did you put those flowers on the table?” Donna can’t imagine why Haley would have done such a thing—she’s pretty sure that her daughter can’t tell a lily from a dandelion—but even so, she seems the more likely culprit than Cameron.

Haley shakes her head. “Nope. They were there when I got home from school. Cam must have put them there.” Selecting a container of yogurt from the refrigerator, Haley leaves Donna to ponder what she has just said.

From the series of frantic clicks on a keyboard coming from their bedroom, Donna deduces that Cameron must be working there. She pokes her head in. “Hey. Did you . . . you got those lilies?” It comes out more awkwardly than Donna wishes.

Cam looks up, not exactly meeting Donna’s eyes. “Yeah. I saw a guy selling them on the street, and I figured . . . I mean, you like lilies, right?”

Donna smiles at her broadly, fondly. “I love them. Thank you.” She’s slightly amazed both by the flowers themselves and by the fact that Cam had to hunt around, find a vase, fill it with water, and put the lilies into it. All of this is very un-Cameron, especially when Cam is as deep in a coding project as she is right now.

Cam shrugs. “It wasn’t a big deal.” She goes back to typing, but Donna thinks she sees her smiling just a little as she does so.

 

**§§§**

A few days later, Cameron shows up at one of their standing afternoon Phoenix-at-Symphonic meetings with a small box of the expensive dark-chocolate-covered cherries that Donna really loves and rarely gets, because they come from a little boutique chocolate shop with erratic, idiosyncratic hours. It’s also in the center of the city, where parking is always difficult. Just as she’s about to leave, Cam pushes the chocolates across the conference table. “Hey, I almost forgot—I got you these.” Cam’s voice is a perfect study in nonchalance.

Donna looks at the box, astonished. “From Figarello’s? You actually managed to get there when they were open?”

Cam twists a lock of her hair. “Yeah, well, I called them last week, and they promised that they’d be open today and that they’d have these in stock. So I just swung by on my way to our meeting.”

Donna knows that there was no “swung by” about it; the store was as inconvenient to everything as any store could possibly be. “You’re amazing. Thank you.” She wishes that she could kiss Cameron, but they’ve never done that at Symphonic before, and she’s not sure how either of them would react. She settles on opening the box, popping one of the chocolates into her mouth, and offering them to Cameron. Cam selects one, grinning at Donna as she does so.

 

**§§§**

One hot Sunday morning, Donna sleeps later than usual. When she wakes, she sees that Cameron’s side of the bed is empty. Blinking in confusion (Cam almost never is up before Donna), Donna pulls on a robe and stumbles into the kitchen. When she gets there, she finds that the table is set, orange juice poured, coffee made, and a basket of delicious-looking pastries placed in the center of everything. Cam is sitting on the sofa in the living room, seemingly engrossed in a paperback.

“What’s all this?” Donna studies the pastries. They must have come from the bakery a few blocks away, which means that Cameron has been there and back while Donna was sleeping.

Cam looks up. “Well, you seemed pretty tired, and I woke up early. I just thought we could have a ready-made brunch today. I mean, it’s just us.” Haley is away for the week on a beach trip with Jordan’s family, so it was indeed just the two of them.

Donna slides next to Cameron on the couch and kisses her. “Everything looks wonderful.” Cam kisses her back, smiling.

At that moment, Donna notices a clumsily wrapped package on the coffee table. She picks it up, looking at Cam inquiringly. Cam looks suddenly embarrassed. “That’s just a thing I got you.” Donna unwraps it to find a battered hardcover collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories.

“I keep hearing about how great Lovecraft is, and I think you’d probably like him. I saw it in that used book store on Cleveland. I want to borrow it after you’re done.” Cam looks down at her own book, as if not quite wanting to see Donna’s expression. Donna reaches over and pushes Cameron’s chin up, so that the two of them are eye to eye.

“Cam, I love it. I love _you_.” Cam squirms a little, doesn’t answer, but kisses Donna for several long moments. Donna kisses her back, and it’s quite awhile before either of them remember the waiting basket of pastries.

 

**2\. Telling Donna’s Parents**

After the talk with Cameron about Cam’s father, Donna spends a lot of time reflecting on the importance of honesty, and how much she has, in fact, always tried to please her parents rather than showing them who she really is. Yet seeing Cameron’s anguish makes Donna realize that she’s lucky even to have the chance to talk to them about her life right now, and she also thinks that Cam shouldn’t have to be the only brave one of the two of them. Donna has been putting off telling her parents about Cameron for months, and she decides that it’s time to bite the bullet and get it done. She calls them in Texas one late June Saturday afternoon when Cam is out seeing a movie with Jordan and Haley, asking that both her mother and father be on the line for what she has to say.

It doesn’t go well. At all.

 **“** I just don’t know what you can be thinking, Donna,” Donna’s mother says, after a few beats of stunned silence. Her tone is sharp and critical. “You could have any man that you want, and you choose _this_ instead? Why do you always make everything so hard for yourself?”

Donna takes a deep breath and counts to three before answering. “I’m thinking that I’m with someone that I care about. I’m thinking that I’m finally happy, after a lot of years of being unhappy. That’s what I’m thinking.”

Donna can almost see her mother’s head shaking as she takes another sip of the wine that’s almost certainly in the hand not holding the telephone extension. “You’re a little too old for a phase like this, aren’t you? Have you considered how this is going to look to the people you work with? And what about your daughters? Have you thought about what it’s going to do to them? You’re just planning to move this . . . this person . . . into your house, to live with you? What do you know about her, really?”

Donna wonders if her father is ever going to contribute anything to this conversation. She counts to three again, and when that isn’t enough to make certain that she doesn’t scream, she counts to five. “I know that I love her, and my daughters love her, and that she loves all of us. What else is there, really?” At this moment, Donna is thankful that she hasn’t pushed Haley to come out to her grandmother. It’s one thing to hear her mother criticize her own life choices. If she had to listen to her say any of this to one of her daughters, well, there would be blood.

After a lot more arguing, in which Donna has to listen to her mother’s opinion about Cameron’s potential intentions ( _Have you considered the possibility that she might be after your money?_ ), Cam’s fitness as a partner ( _Isn’t she the one who abandoned your business?_ ) and to a few random shots about Gordon thrown in for good measure, Donna finally hangs up the phone, tired and drained. She changes into her bathing suit and starts to swim laps carefully and methodically. She’s still at it two hours later, when Cameron comes back. Donna swims to the far side of the pool and hangs on to its edge.

From the expression on Cam’s face, Donna can see that Cameron immediately knows that something is wrong. “Are you . . . ok?”

Donna feels a burble of tears threatening to spill over, and she fights like hell to keep that from happening. She doesn’t know how she’s going to talk about any of this with Cameron, especially given what Cam has just gone through with the memory of her father. “I’m fine. Is Haley staying over at Jordan’s?”

Cam nods, still looking worried. Donna smiles at her. “Really, I’m fine. I’ll just take a shower, and then we can figure out something for dinner.”

After her shower, Donna has just changed and is sitting on her bed staring vaguely into space when Cameron pokes her head in. “Look, I know you’re not fine. We said we’d tell each other stuff, remember? That means you, too. What happened today?” She sits on the bed next to Donna and takes her hand, and this time, Donna can’t stop the tears welling in her eyes from escaping. Haltingly, she tells Cam everything.

Cameron is silent for a couple of beats. “That really sucks. I’m sorry.”

Donna shakes her head, wondering how Cam is feeling about all this, how insulted she might be. “My parents didn’t really like Gordon either—they put up with him because they knew I loved him, but that’s about it. This was different, though. It was worse.” Donna hesitates, then continues. “I hope this isn’t going to make you feel even more bad about your father.”

Cam gives her a look so shot through with love that Donna almost winces at the force of it. “Nope. You said that we’re not our parents, and you were right. Plus, it’s kind of nice to think that my father might not have been the only asshole in the world about this. It makes it seem a little less unforgivable, if that makes any sense.”

Donna nods, because it sort of does. “Yeah. And it’s true: we’re not our parents. We’re . . . us.” She puts her head on Cam’s shoulder and starts to feel a little better.

After awhile, she hears Cameron saying something. “Hey, you just talked about your mother. What did your father say?”

Donna can’t help laughing at that. It comes out a little like a shaky bark, but it’s real nonetheless. “He just said that you were probably better at carving a turkey than Gordon ever was, so the whole idea seemed fine to him.”

Cameron grins at her. “Actually, I’ve never carved a turkey in my life. Good thing I have almost four months to learn, if they end up showing up here for Thanksgiving.” Donna rolls her eyes at the thought, but the heaviness that she’d felt after her conversation with her parents slowly drifts away.

 

**3\. Billy Joel**

Cam always listens to music with headphones, so it takes Donna awhile to catch on to the fact that a lot of Billy Joel seems to be streaming on Cameron’s MusicLand playlists. “I thought you hated Billy Joel,” she says when she realizes what Cam has been listening to.

Cam looks startled, and then a little abashed. “I never said that I hated him. I just . . . never really thought about listening to him.”

Donna stares at her. Who was it who had been saying how much Billy Joel sucks all of these years, if that wasn’t Cameron? “I guess you must have really liked the livestream of his concert.” It _was_ , after all, MusicLand’s most popular live event by far, so maybe it’s not surprising that it seems to have had some sort of lasting effect on Cam.

Peculiarly, Cam looks visibly relieved at Donna’s comment. “Yeah. That was pretty awesome, wasn’t it? The stream worked perfectly. It almost felt like being at a real concert with live people.”

Donna nods, thinking about all of the energy that she had felt that night, as if the MusicLand users were somehow bound together in an amazing, symbiotic experience. It had been special.

As Cameron gives Donna a crooked smile, Donna hears the tinny sound of ["Piano Man"](http://www.heatherweb.com/stuff/fade/pianoman.mp3) coming out of the headphones that are dangling off of Cam’s ears. “That’s actually one of my favorite Billy Joel songs.”

“Really?” Cameron seems interested in that.

“Yeah. It always makes me feel . . .lucky. All of those people in that bar had dreams, but they just stayed that way.We . . . we’ve gotten to _do_ things, real things.” Donna feels a little silly, and she doesn’t think that she’s doing a very good job of explaining what she means. The look on Cameron’s face, however, tells Donna that she has been understood nonetheless.

 

**4\. Cooking**

What Donna notices first are the cookbooks, big, hardcover copies of both the _James Beard Cookbook_ and the _New Basics Cookbook_ that suddenly seem to have materialized in the living room. Then she sees that Cameron appears to be _reading_ those cookbooks at night, when she would normally either be coding or deep into some science fiction or horror novel (And in fact, Donna thinks before she can stop herself, Cameron reading cookbooks isn’t all that different from a Twilight Zone episode.)

Donna doesn’t say anything about the cookbooks, because she doesn’t want to embarrass Cameron and because she wants to see how the whole thing is going to play out. One night, however, she comes home to the odd sight of Cameron cutting up vegetables.

This time it proves impossible not to comment. “No takeout tonight?” It’s Thursday, and Thursday is normally their night for Thai. (Easy to remember, Cam always says, because “Thai” and “Thursday” both start with “Th.” It’s silly, but Donna laughs every time she hears Cameron explain it.)

Cam shrugs, not taking her eyes off of her little piles of chopped celery and onions. “I thought I’d try making this pasta and bean soup. It sounded good, and it seems easy enough.” She sounds offhand, as though searching for a recipe, reading it, shopping for ingredients, and crafting the whole thing into a meal is something that she does every day. It isn’t, and she and Donna both know it.

Donna decides not to ponder this new interest of Cameron’s too much; it would be wonderful if at least one of them somehow became adept at cooking. “It looks great. Do you want me to go out and get some bread to go with it?”

Cam shakes her head. “I already got some,” she says, pointing with her chin to a long, thin bag with a couple of baguettes poking out. “Everything should be done in about an hour. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

Donna shakes her head bemusedly, but she obediently leaves Cam to her chopping. There could be worse developments than this one.

 

**§§§**

That soup (which came out fine, even if it was an odd choice for a mid-July dinner) doesn’t turn out to be a one-off; Cameron enthusiasm for cooking becomes even more established as the summer winds down. The pile of cookbooks on the dining room table becomes taller, and Cameron spends more time on her Usenet cooking group and even signs up for an email listserv to talk about recipes. (Donna remembers Cam’s scorn, years ago, about the idea of housewives swapping recipes on Community, but she wisely decides not to remind Cam of it.)

The amazing thing of it all is that Cameron turns out to be _good_ at cooking. “It’s a little like coding,” Cam tries to explain to Donna one evening while stirring a risotto. “There’s a structure, but there’s room to do what you want.”

For Donna, cooking has always been just another chore on a long list, something to remind her that she’s probably shortchanging her daughters in ways that her mother never shortchanged her. It’s easier now that Joanie is in college and Haley is often busy with Jordan; at least she doesn’t have the responsibility of providing decent dinners for them weighing her down. Although she’s mastered a few standard things over the years, she’s never enjoyed cooking for its own sake. “I never thought about it like that.”

Cameron’s stirring is careful and methodical. “Yeah, me either, until . . . until I did. I also really like, well, making things for us to eat, and then eating them with you. It’s . . . nice.”

Donna goes over to Cam, puts her arms around her from behind, and kisses the back of her neck. Cam twists around and grins, but doesn’t stop stirring. “Don’t make me burn the risotto!”

Donna laughs and kisses her neck again.

 

**5\. The Kiss**

At an afternoon Symphonic meeting in early August, Donna and Cameron have been arguing for over an hour about how many new coders they should hire over the next six months.

“Donna, we’re fine. The guys that we have now all really understand the MusicLand coding, and it would take more of my time to get new hires up to speed than it’s worth. Trust me.” Cam has been repeating herself for the past twenty minutes, and Donna isn’t making any headway.

Donna tries again. “Look, you’re doing too much, and it’s only going to get worse. I’m not saying that we need more creative talent; I do think that we have that covered. But what would be the harm in hiring another three or four coding grunts, so you don’t have to waste your time with busy work?”

Cam runs her fingers through her hair, clearly frustrated. “You just don’t always know what’s going to be busy work and what’s going to be really fundamental, not until you’re deep into it.”

Donna closes her eyes for a second, thinking carefully about what to say next. “We always seem to have some version of this argument, don’t we?It’s just . . . one of our things. I want you to give up some of the work, and you can’t stand the idea. What are we going to do about it?”

Cam sighs. “I don’t know why it’s always so hard for me. It’s stupid. I know that I can’t do everything myself if we’re going to have an actual growing business.”

“Look, why don’t we do this? We hire just one coding grunt and see how it goes. If it’s working out, we can talk about adding one or two more in a few months. Does that sound ok?” Donna watches Cameron closely, thankful that her stubborn expression seems to be softening.

“Yeah, ok, we can do that,” Cam mutters. “It’s fine.”

Donna looks at Cameron, trying to assess whether it really _is_ fine. “I just . . . I worry about you sometimes, about how hard you work. I know that I shouldn’t, but I do.” It’s blurted out without thought, but Donna realizes how true it is. Unbidden, an image from years ago of Cameron asleep at her desk floats across her brain. Seeing Cam so exhausted was a large part of the reason why she had lied to her about firing Doug and Craig: she thought Cam needed them, whether she wanted them or not. Years of pain have taught Donna not to try something like that ever again, but they haven’t stopped her from wanting to make things easier for Cameron.

Donna sees that Cam is smiling at her softly. “I know you do. I . . . I’m glad you do. For the record, you work too hard, too.” And suddenly, Cam is kissing Donna, kissing her on the lips and not on the cheek, kissing her in a way that could never be handwaved away as friendly or platonic. When she pulls back, they both look at each other, startled. The conference room door is open, and the bullpen is buzzing with activity. Anyone could have walked by, glanced in, and seen it. Donna sees that Cam is biting her lip, obviously concerned about how Donna is going to react to her impulse.

After a beat, Donna’s reaction is _the hell with it,_ and she kisses Cameron back. She’d kissed Gordon in public, at Mutiny, at work events, hundreds of times. Why should kissing Cam be any different? This isn’t an inappropriate makeout session; it’s just a kiss, and there isn’t a single damn thing wrong with doing it. After all, everyone at Symphonic knows that she and Cameron are a couple anyway. Now, if any of them see this, they’ll _really_ know it. Donna tries not to laugh out loud at the image of what Elias’s expression would be.

 

**0\. Phoenix**

One thing that never changes, that never has changed no matter where they are in their continually shifting personal relationship, is the delight that both Cameron and Donna feel in the growing success of Phoenix. Mutiny will always be the most fun that either of them has ever had, but Phoenix is their rebirth, their second chance, their present and their future. No matter how hard they work—and both of them have been working exceptionally hard all summer—they never take the miracle of it all for granted.

It’s late one night when both Donna and Cameron are hunched over the dining room table, silent and concentrating. Cam is pouring over new code written by her team (admitting grudgingly to Donna that it’s pretty compact and efficient, even if she didn’t write it herself) and Donna is squinting at data reports of user behavior, trying to detect trends that will help them attract and retain more subscribers in the future. At one point, they both look up at the same time, catch the other’s eye, and smile tiredly.

Donna rubs her eyes, feeling as though she’s about to topple over. She had an early meeting at Symphonic this morning, and she has another one at 8:00 AM tomorrow. Looking at her watch, she realizes that leaves her about five hours to sleep before she has to get up again and do it all again. “I think I’ve got to crash. Are you coming up soon?”

Cam nods. “Sort of soon. I just need to finish up reviewing this block.”

Donna smiles fondly. Cam’s “sort of soon” can mean anything from a half hour to tomorrow morning.

“Donna . . . how long are you going to keep doing this?” Cam sounds hesitant, but she forces it out nonetheless.

Donna is so startled that she almost forgets how tired she is. “What do you mean? What _this_?”

“You can’t keep being a managing partner of Symphonic and a co-founder of Phoenix at the same time, not forever. I mean, it was fine at the beginning, but we’re getting pretty big, and sooner or later, we’re going to go public. What then?” Cam isn’t looking at Donna when she says this.

Donna half shrugs. “I know that, but this is a much larger conversation than we can have right now. For the record, when I really have to choose, there won’t be any contest. I choose Phoenix, always.” She means that, but that doesn’t mean that giving up Symphonic will be easy.

Cameron looks relieved. “Good. Me too.” She goes back to studying the code.

Donna kisses her and stumbles off to bed, thinking about what they’ve both just said. In so many ways, just having Phoenix to concentrate on would be wonderful—it would mean more time with Cameron, and she’d also be able to do a better job of fostering the growth of MusicLand. Maybe, she thinks as she drifts off to sleep, she should step down as managing partner sooner rather than later, and just keep her hand in a couple of Symphonic clients, the way Diane has done. That would be easier, and less scarily definitive, than quitting the company entirely. Much as she hates to admit it, she knows that if she keeps trying to do two demanding jobs forever, she’ll end up not doing either one of them well. But as she told Cam, when it comes down to it, the choice will be an easy one. She’s proud of the changes she’s made and the work that she’s done at Symphonic, but Phoenix and Musicland are her heart children. She couldn’t give them up anymore than she could abandon Cameron.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So after those last few angsty chapters, I needed the palate-cleanser of a little domestic fluff. I also indulged my love of 5 + 1 fics, which have always been one of my favorite things to write. It's a relief to me that Donna and Cam are back on track!


	34. Chapter 34

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein a difficult request is made and a trip is taken.

The night before Haley’s departure for Stanford, Cameron prepares a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs.Her cooking experiments have been gradually getting more adventurous—she actually made paella last weekend, and Donna and Haley pronounced it delicious—but somehow, something simple and basic feels right for the occasion. Donna, who has been in a near-panic helping Haley shop and pack, is more than willing to delegate the farewell dinner, especially now that she’s fairly confident that they aren’t going to be poisoned by what Cameron puts in front of them. Cam is almost as puzzled as Donna is about this new interest in cooking; after a lifetime of making meals out of microwaves and toasters, she’s not exactly sure where it’s coming from. But somehow, after everything, the desire to _give something back_ , to take care of Donna the way Donna seems able to take care of her, is strong, and learning how to cook seems to be the peculiar way in which this desire has chosen to manifest itself.

Yet when the three of them finally sit down to eat, the food (as good as it is, and it _is_ good), is the last thing on any of their minds. Haley will barely be a twenty-minute drive away, but there’s no pretending that tomorrow isn’t a milestone for everyone. Cutting into a meatball, Cameron watches Donna trying determinedly to look cheerful and Haley anxiously chewing on a thumbnail. It’s going to be rough on both of them, on _all_ of them.

“Anything left to load in the truck?” Cam decides that focusing on logistics and details is probably the safest way to go, given all of the suppressed emotion she senses in the room. She and Donna are going to drive Haley to Stanford tomorrow for orientation, and the bed of Cam’s truck is packed to the gills with clothes and books and furniture.

Haley shakes her head. “Just my laptop, but I’ll take that with me tomorrow.” Cam nods, knowing that Haley’s laptop is her number-one prized possession. There’s no way that she would let it out of her sight overnight.

“Good.” Cam sprinkles some Parmesan onto her spaghetti, wishing that Haley would eat something. (God, when did she become the sort of person who worries about that?) “We’ll be able to get an early start.”

Haley nods, and then glances at Donna. “Mom . . . you’re going to be ok, right? I mean, you can visit whenever you want.”

Donna tries to make a joke out of it. “Be careful what you offer. No, of course I’ll be fine. Cameron and I will be able to have those wild parties we’re always talking about.”

Haley smiles, looking a fraction less anxious, and Cameron’s heart is suddenly flooded with fondness. Not many kids worry about their mothers the day before going off to their dream school; _she_ certainly hadn’t. Although Austin Tech was never exactly her dream, it had allowed her to get far away from her mother and immerse herself in code, and that made it seem like paradise. Cam had never given a thought to anything other than getting the hell out of Dodge, so she’s glad to see evidence that, unlike her, Haley has a genuine connection to her family.

“I can’t wait to hear about your roommate,” Cam grins. “Maybe she’ll be into show tunes and soap operas.”

Haley rolls her eyes. “She better not be. We emailed each other last week, and she seems ok, from what I can tell. She’s from New Jersey, so she’s going to have to fly here. I can’t wait to meet her.” She starts to eat her spaghetti, and Donna and Cam glance at each other, relieved.

They’re just finishing up when the phone rings. Haley springs to get it, and Cam knows that she’s probably hoping it’s Jordan, who left for Berkeley earlier that week.

“Oh, hi. No, it’s great that you called. Yeah, tomorrow. Cam and my mom are taking me.” Haley rolls her eyes at whatever the person on the other end of the line is saying.

Not Jordan, Cam surmises, since Haley doesn’t have the particular cadence that she always uses to talk to her girlfriend. But who?

“Yeah, that would be awesome. Yeah, right. I can dream, anyway.” Haley laughs. “Tell Brian I said hi. I will. Thanks, Joe.”

Cameron smiles to herself, touched as always by just how much Joe cares about Haley. Instead of drifting apart, the chains of connection binding all of them seem, if anything, to be stronger than ever.

 

**§§§**

Donna and Cameron are both quiet during the short ride back from Stanford the following afternoon. Cam glances over at Donna, who had heroically managed not to cry while hugging Haley goodbye. “Hey . . . . you doing ok?”

Donna sighs. “Yeah, sort of. I’m being ridiculous—Haley’s spent so much time with Jordan this year that it’s practically as though she moved out months ago, and Stanford is barely a half hour away even when traffic is terrible. But still, Haley’s going to college is a big deal. I wish that Gordon . . .” Donna doesn’t finish the sentence, and Cameron reaches over to touch her hand.

Cam feels a little weird about Haley’s leaving, some strange mixture of sadness and nostalgia. She tries to verbalize some of that to Donna. “I’m going to miss her, but it’s kind of cool . . .seeing her start everything. This is sort of her beginning of becoming a grownup, you know?”

Donna nods. “Exactly. She’s going to have a wonderful life, I think, and I know it can’t start without her needing me less and less, and that’s all natural and right. But I still somehow hate it, because apparently I’m a clingy, demanding mother.” She smiles slightly, and Cameron squeezes Donna’s hand in response.

“Maybe she’ll need to do laundry next weekend. After all, she doesn’t need quarters here. I think we can count on pretty regular visits.” Cam is happy when she sees Donna smile wanly at this lame attempt at a joke.

 

**§§§**

Haley calls on Wednesday and talks to both of them, chattering about the start of classes and how much fun her roommate has turned out to be. No, she won’t be coming home this weekend, because there’s a film festival on campus that Jordan wants to check out, but maybe she’ll see them in a week or so.

Donna tries not to look disappointed as she hangs up the phone, and Cameron aches for her a little. There has to be _something_ that she can do for Donna, something bigger than cooking food that she likes or buying her those chocolate-covered cherry things. Late that night, long after Donna has fallen asleep beside her, Cam suddenly realizes what that something should be: she wants to take Donna away for the weekend, away to somewhere peaceful and wonderful. After only a little more reflection, she knows exactly where they should go.

Years ago, right after floating the idea of a Mutiny IPO, Diane had offered the two of them a weekend at her vineyard to heal their obviously growing rift.

_Donna, icy. “Do you want to drive up tonight or in the morning?”_

_“While a wine farm retreat with you sounds super romantic, I’m busy this weekend.” Cameron stalks off without another word._

What might have happened, Cameron wonders drowsily, if she _had_ gone with Donna that weekend? Would they have managed to understand each other? Would she have been able to forgive Donna’s lie? Could they have reached a compromise about the IPO, one that might have saved Mutiny instead of destroying it? The past is past, and none of these questions will ever have answers. Still, Cameron realizes that going to that vineyard now _means something_ to her, and she wonders if it might mean something to Donna as well.

 

**§§§**

After Donna leaves for the office the next morning, Cameron considers her options. Asking Bos would be the easy thing to do—he could check with Diane and let Cam know whether going to their vineyard might be a possibility for this weekend. She hasn’t seen Bos for awhile, and dropping in on him would be natural.

But somehow, some little voice inside Cameron—maybe that same sort-of-Gordon voice that had intoned _the right thing is always hard_ —is whispering that she needs to ask Diane herself, even though that means having an actual _conversation_ with her. But for some reason, that conversation is part of what she wants to give to Donna, even though Donna will probably never know that it happened. After all, if she can manage to talk to Donna about her father, she can definitely also try to do her part in getting over the awkwardness that has lurked between herself and Diane for years. She has to try, anyway.

Cameron’s resolve nearly fails her, however, when Diane answers the ringing doorbell. For a split second, Cam almost panics and asks for Bos, but Diane doesn’t give her that opportunity. “Hello, Cameron. I’m afraid that John is off buying some part or other for the boat. Do you want me to tell him that you stopped by?”

Cam shakes her head. “No, I, um, I came to see you.”

If Diane is surprised, she doesn’t show it. “Then you’re in luck, because here I am. Come on in.”

Cameron follows Diane into the large, beautiful living room and accepts her offer of tea. (Cam doesn’t like tea much, but she’s sure that having something to do with her hands, something to look at other than Diane, will be an invaluable asset.) All too quickly Diane is back with two mugs of tea and a tray containing milk, sugar, and some sort of oddly-shaped cookies that Cam later learns are biscotti.Grimacing after taking a cautious sip of her tea, Cameron loads it up with milk and sugar. Better.

Diane is watching her with some amusement. “So, what can I do for you? Is this about MusicLand?”

Cam shakes her head, takes a breath, and plunges in. “No, things with MusicLand are going great. I mean, we probably need to figure out our next big step before our subscriber base starts leveling off, but Donna and I haven’t really talked about that yet. No, I sort of . . . I want to ask you a favor.” She stops, a little embarrassed.

Diane, who is probably as nonplussed to have Cameron sitting in her living room asking for something as Cam is to be here, is giving her a peculiar look. When Cam doesn’t continue, Diane prompts her. “I need to hear it if I’m going to be able to do it.”

Cam shrugs inwardly and starts again. “So, I kind of want to do something with Donna this weekend, because she’s a little sad about Haley being gone, and I thought maybe . . . maybe we could go to your vineyard. That is, if you’re not using it.” Cameron relaxes a bit, glad to have gotten it out, even though she hasn’t—and she probably couldn’t—explain to Diane what going to that vineyard would mean to both of them. Better to let Diane think that she’s too stingy to pay for a B & B and let it go at that.

“We’re not using it this weekend; we’ll be out on the boat, if John manages to fix whatever he thinks isn’t working properly. So yes, you and Donna are certainly welcome to the place.” Diane stops, looking as though she wants to say more.

Cameron is relieved; this conversation has turned out to be more straightforward than she had feared. “Thank you. Really, thanks.” Cam hears her voice sounding a little more emotional than it probably should, and she curses it silently.

Diane obviously hears it as well.“Cameron . . . it’s good that you’re looking after Donna. I’m glad that the two of you are happy. I mean that.”

Cam turns her eyes to her mug of tea and takes another sip; she might have overdone it with the sugar. “I . . . thanks. Thanks for saying that.”

Diane is looking at Cam thoughtfully. “You and I haven’t always had the easiest relationship, have we?”

Cam wonders how to respond to that; it’s hard to have a relationship with someone who obviously thinks that you’re a flake and quite possibly a danger to others. She settles on shrugging and gulping more of the now-lukewarm tea.

“What were you going to say?” Damn Diane and that straightforward, no bullshit thing that she always has going.

Cam sighs. Fuck it. She knows that part of the reason she came here was to make things better with this woman. “I just think that ever since Mutiny you haven’t, well, trusted me not to screw everything up, especially with Bos and Donna.” She doesn’t look at Diane as she says this, but she’s glad that it’s finally out in the open.

Diane hesitates. “I can see why you might feel that way; the end of Mutiny was painful for all of us. I do tend to be a little too . . . protective . . . of people that I care about. And after you . . . after Donna wasn’t going to be working with you on that browser project, well, she was shattered.” Diane lets the sentence hang there, and it cuts into Cameron like a knife. After Donna wasn’t going to be working on the project that she had initiated, after Cameron had pushed her out of it without a bit of remorse or reflection.

Cameron chews absently on a fingernail. “Yeah, I know, I wish . . . I wish a lot of things. But we’re not those people anymore.” That morning, almost six years ago now, feels like a lifetime ago.

Diane ‘s expression is softer now. “But John is my husband and Donna is one of my best friends, and you’re tremendously important to both of them. That makes you important to me, too. I admit that I had my doubts about you and Donna, but she’s obviously happy, and happiness isn’t anything to take for granted. How would it be if you and I try to give each other the benefit of the doubt?” Cameron doesn’t think that she’s ever heard Diane sounding as awkward as she’s sounding right now.

Cameron nods, feeling grateful.“Yeah, I can . . . I can do that. And I really don’t blame you for worrying about Donna. She needs people to worry about her.” This time she looks right at Diane, whom she finds gazing at her with an expression that’s a little difficult to decipher.

“Good. Now, let me get you the keys to the vineyard, and I’ll print out the directions.” When Diane returns to the living room a few minutes later, Cameron has finished her tea and is nibbling on a biscotti contentedly. This trip, she’s certain, is going to be great.

 

**§§§**

All Cameron tells Donna at first is that they’re going away for the weekend, but that she wants to keep the destination a surprise until they actually head out. Donna, looking both bemused and charmed, doesn’t argue. She comes home from work early on Friday, so they can be on the road before the weekend traffic really starts to hit.

The drive north to Sonoma, Cam calculates, should take a little less than two hours. She’s quiet until they pull onto the highway, but she knows that soon enough Donna will figure out where they must be going. “So—this weekend, the truck isn’t really a truck.”

Donna shakes her head, amused. “It’s not? So what is it?”

“It’s . . . a time machine.” Cheesy, sure, but Cameron has been feeling like a blob of Velveeta these days, and she just decides to go with it.

Donna arches an eyebrow. “Really? It doesn’t _look_ like a DeLorean.”

Cam snorts, but she also makes a mental note to rent _Back to the Future_ for them soon. “So, remember how Diane offered us her vineyard for a weekend way, way back, right before . . . everything?”

Donna visibly tenses a little as she nods. Of course she remembers.

“Anyway, I always kind of wondered what might have happened if I’d gone, if everything would have still, well, fallen apart. I wish that I _had_ gone. And so that’s where we’re going this weekend. It’s . . . it’s another do-over.” Cam keeps her eyes on the road, suddenly panicking. Maybe this whole idea is ridiculous. There’s cheese, and then there’s . . . this.

Donna doesn’t say anything for a moment, but when she does, her voice sounds different from the way it had sounded moments before. “Cam . . . you don’t need to feel guilty about that. I should have. . . if I had apologized to you like any normal person would have done, if I had really told you how much I _wanted_ you to go, you probably would have come. It was much more my fault than your fault.”

Cam thinks about that for a second. “Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? We both screwed up a lot of things, back then. All I know is that I really wish I had gone then, and that I want to go now.”

“I do, too. This is a great idea.” Out of the corner of her eye, Cameron can see that Donna is suddenly smiling in a way that makes her seem to glow from within, and Cam feels a shot of joy at the sight of it.As usual, Donna seems to have the ability to parse halting half-explanations and cut to the heart of what Cameron is actually trying to convey. The fact that Donna really _gets_ her, Cam thinks, is one of the very best things about what they have going.

 

**§§§**

Once they arrive and settle in, Cameron is amazed at the place. “Jesus. This is so . . . I mean, it’s rich, but it’s also, I don’t know, comfortable. No wonder Bos likes it here so much.”

Donna is nodding. “I know—it’s really beautiful, isn’t it? The first time I came here, I just . . . I had never really seen what success in tech looked like, you know? I think seeing that made me want the IPO, no matter . . . no matter what it took.” She falls silent, contemplative.

Cam has never really thought about “success in tech” in terms like that. “I just always wanted whatever we built to be great, to be perfect. I never really thought much about the money part, and I still don’t.” She grins suddenly. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that the money part is pretty cool.”

Donna laughs, apparently shrugging off the flash of melancholy that Cameron had noticed in her expression. “It doesn’t make the world go round, but it’s better to have it than not to have it.”

Cam smiles back, thinking about how lucky she is right now, to have work that she loves and enough money not to have to worry about day-to-day survival. “So let’s get going. What do you want to do first?”

Donna decides that she wants to take a walk around the vineyard before dinner, and Cameron joins her. Beginning with a spectacular early autumn sunset, their weekend passes in a continual haze of great food, sex, long walks, and conversations about topics large and small. Unlike most things that are anticipated and then come to pass, everything about the weekend more than lives up to Cameron’s expectations. Since it’s over almost too quickly, they decide to drive back on Monday morning, to give themselves one extra evening. After a dinner of grilled salmon and corn—Donna cooks this one, because Cameron hasn’t mastered a grill yet—they settle down together on a blanket in the vineyard, watching as the world around them slowly darkens.

Donna lies down on the blanket, looking up at Cam. “Thanks for thinking of this. Being here with you has been . . . wonderful.”

Cam lowers herself next to her, head nestling into Donna’s shoulder. “Aren’t you glad it’s now and not then? Things are so much better than they were.” Trite and stupid, but Cameron means it with all of her heart.

Donna strokes Cameron’s hair. “Yeah, I am. I’m sorry not all of it has been easy for you, but I guess we have no right to expect ‘easy,’ given everything.”

“That doesn’t matter. I mean, yeah, thinking that my father might have hated me sucks, and I know I freaked out about it. But I . . . I can deal with that, as long as I get to be with you. It’s a fair tradeoff.” Cam doesn’t even feel embarrassed as she says this; the darkness and quiet of the vineyard seems to be dragging emotional confessions out of her, whether she wants it to or not.

Donna kisses her without saying anything, and they both lie silently for a few moments. Cameron is almost dozing off when she hears Donna saying something. “That first time I was here, when you didn’t come—I kind of hallucinated you.”

That gets Cameron’s attention. “What?”

Donna looks at her, eyes distant. “Yeah. Diane’s daughter Kimberly was here with a couple of her college friends, and they were doing ‘shrooms.I took some, too.”

“Huh.” Cam tries to picture the scene. “What did I do in the hallucination?”

Donna sighs. “I was lying in the vineyard, just about here, in fact, and you just sort of . . . appeared and said that you figured we should talk. And we did; it was the sort of conversation that we never were able to have then. I ended up saying that I was sorry for lying to you, and you told me that you forgave me. And you looked, well, beautiful. But then . . . it all just disappeared, like sand.” Donna’s voice chokes a little at the memory. “It made me want to try to talk to you like that, but when I got back home . . . you had already moved out.”

Cameron sits up suddenly, clearly startling Donna. “That’s never going to happen again.”

“What won’t? I won’t hallucinate you?” Donna sits up too, looking at her.

“I’m never going to just . . . leave like that again. I mean, I can’t promise that we’ll never fight, or that something won’t freak me out, or that I won’t ever screw up, but I’m not going to run away again. I’ve had it with doing that.” Cameron means it, possibly more than she’s ever meant anything. Somehow running away from Donna and then coming back to tell her everything has made Cam . . . different. Better. More like a grownup. She knows what she wants in a way that she hadn’t ever really known before.

Donna takes her hand. “Cam, if you sometimes want to be by yourself, for whatever reason . . . you can do that. You don’t have to feel that you never can. I know you need that sometimes.” Donna falls silent, and Cam wonders what it is that she might be remembering.

“Thanks, but that’s not what I mean. There’s . . . there’s a difference between getting away because you need space to hear your own voice and running away because you can’t face something hard. I just . . . I’m tired of running away, and I’m not going to do that from you anymore. That’s all.” Cameron lies down again and shuts her eyes, apparently exhausted by this declaration.

Donna lies down next to her, pulling her close. “Good. I want you to stick around.”

Cameron smiles without opening her eyes. “Good thing you do, because you’re stuck with me.” After that they both doze together, burying the past, savoring the present and dreaming of the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, it was the weirdest thing--literally a couple of hours after I finished writing this chapter, haltandcatchfiretothemax posted one of her wonderful headcanons about Donna and Cam going to Diane's Sonoma vineyard after dropping Haley off at college. Things go differently for them there, but you all should [check it out](http://haltandcatchfiretothemax.tumblr.com/post/178086762456/friday-fic-in-which-cameron-and-donna-make-some)!


	35. Chapter 35

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein both professional and personal decisions are made.

Always the engineer, Donna often thinks about her relationship with Cameron in distinct development phases: there was the Mutiny phase; the estrangement phase; the friendship reconciliation phase; the beginnings of romance phase; and then (mercifully short but painfully real nonetheless) the Cameron-freaking-out phase. The phase they’re in currently is something new, something both more intense and better than anything they’ve ever had before. Everything about their relationship now is so—she’s afraid even to think the word, but it pops into her mind despite her best efforts— _perfect_ that Donna can’t trust that it’s actually real. Cam is still Cam, but she’s more attentive, more grounded, more certain of who she is and what she wants, than Donna has ever seen her before.Cameron might have had to go through a personal hell to get here, but here, right now, is very, very good.

In mid-October, Stanford has a Parents Weekend, and Donna and Cameron attend every single showing-off-the-University event that it offers. (Haley pretends to be embarrassed at their enthusiasm, but Donna can tell that she’s genuinely pleased to have them there.) After two days of whirlwind campus tours, lectures, speeches, open houses, and on- and off-campus meals, Donna is exhausted and elated at how happy Haley obviously is at this school.

“Midterms are coming up pretty soon,” Haley says, talking through a mouthful of Pad Thai on Sunday night, right before Cam and Donna are ready to head back home. “Classes seem to be going fine, but you never know. I have a philosophy paper due in two weeks, all about artificial intelligence and human emotion. I just want it to be good.”

“It will be.” Cameron sounds as confident as Donna feels; right now, she’s just basking in the brilliance of her daughter, and she doesn’t care that it probably makes her one of the most stereotypical mom clichés in the universe. She listens as Haley and Cameron talk about the paper, letting the sound of their words wash through her. Donna will never stop being moved by the strength of the bond that Cam has with her daughters, at how much they obviously love one another.

Later, after they’ve hugged Haley goodbye and are making the short trip back to the house, Cameron yawns contentedly. “Haley’s really doing great, isn’t she?”

Donna smiles, thinking about the weekend. “Yeah, she really is. Joanie is, too; NYU turned out to be exactly the right place for her. I feel as though I’ve won the lottery lately.” She doesn’t elaborate, but when she feels Cameron touching her hand, she knows that the broader meaning of that sentence has been understood.

Cameron is up even earlier than Donna is the next morning, which is unusual for a Monday (or, Donna reflects wryly, for any day ending in “y”). When Donna enters the kitchen, she finds the coffee ready and Cameron scrambling eggs.

“Well, you’re getting the week started with a bang,” Donna says, accepting her plate with a smile. She notes that it seems to include mushrooms and Swiss cheese, and it looks delicious. Cameron’s newfound interest in cooking has certainly been a useful development for both of them.

Cam shrugs, eyes intent on dishing out her own plate of eggs. “Yeah, well . . . busy week for both of us. I figured some protein might be in order.” She sits down at the table across from Donna and digs in. Donnaglances at her, wondering why the sight of Cameron chewing eggs suddenly seems so touching and poignant.

Donna finishes her eggs and takes a sip of coffee. “I actually have a kind of big idea that I want to talk about with you today during our Phoenix meeting. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile now.”

“Mysterious!” Cam is grinning at her. “Ok, chief; I’ll be on time today.” She picks up their plates, puts them into the sink, and rinses them off. Donna watches her, still bemused. This new, domestic version of Cameron is a continual surprise.

Donna is still smiling to herself when she hears Cameron saying something to her. “So, there’s just this thing that I wanted to give you.” Cam sounds a little awkward as she pushes something across the table.

Donna picks it up. “It’s a key.” She turns it over, studying it. “You bought me that DeLorean, didn’t you?”

Now Cameron is grinning. “Your birthday isn’t for a few months. No, this is just . . . I thought maybe you should have a key to the Airstream, since I have a key to, well, here.” Cam looks embarrassed again, and she avoids Donna’s glance by pouring herself another mug of coffee.

Unexpectedly, Donna feels a prickle of tears. Cameron’s offering up free access to her private space is big, and she can’t pretend to herself that it isn’t. Little by little, day by day, layers of Cameron are peeling away before Donna’s eyes.

Donna watches Cam adding sugar to her coffee. “Hey—I love you.” Without having planned it, or even reflecting on the wisdom of doing it, Donna finds that she’s been saying that a lot to Cam lately, mostly because she thinks Cameron really needs to hear it over and over again. Sometimes Cameron just shrugs when Donna says it. Sometimes she says “Ditto,” pretending to be [Sam in _Ghost_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhkwiJowIUM). Once in a great while, like now, she says it back.And as always, hearing that from Cameron hits Donna hard, hits her like a rare chord of her very favorite music.

 

**§§§**

As she had promised to be, Cameron is on time for their Phoenix meeting that afternoon. “I brought those tuna salad sandwiches that you like,” she says, handing a brown bag to Donna. “If we’re going to talk about a big idea, we need sustenance.” They enter their usual conference room, shutting the door behind them.

Donna unwraps her sandwich—she _does_ love these, mostly because the baguettes from this sandwich shop are amazing—and begins. “So I’ve been thinking a lot about MusicLand. We’re doing great so far: our user base has been growing, and the word of mouth has been terrific. But I think we’re going to hit a wall soon, and we have to get ahead of that.”

Cam is nodding. “Yeah, I’ve been worrying about that, too.”

Donna takes a bite of her sandwich. “The problem with MP3 files is that our users can’t take them anywhere: they have to listen to them on their computers while they’re logged into MusicLand. In a way, that’s been great for us, but ultimately we need to think bigger. MP3s are limited right now, because people can’t listen to them in a car, or while they’re jogging, or while they’re travelling on a plane. But what if they could?”

“Well, they can burn them to CDs right now, and then play them on a CD player.” Cam is frowning, clearly thinking hard about what Donna is saying.

“Sure, theoretically. But lots of CD players can’t play those home-burned discs, and even if they can, navigating through menus to get to those files is really cumbersome. We need to give users a different way.” Donna is trying to keep the excitement out of her voice, but she hears it creeping in nonetheless. What she’s thinking about is big, and she knows it.

Cameron flashes Donna a look laced with fondness, as though Donna’s presenting a new idea is one of the best things that she’s ever seen. “Ok, so you’re thinking about some sort of portable . . . something . . . that can play MP3s?”

“Exactly! Imagine if we had a little MusicLand2Go device, something that could fit in your pocket. Users would be able to transfer their music—and their playlists—to it. They could throw their CDs into the garbage; they’d never need to burn a CD again, ever.” Donna’s eyes are glowing as she describes it.

Cam grins at her. “I love it. They’d need to be subscribers to MusicLand to use the device, but they’d have even more reasons for doing it.”

Donna nods, happy that Cam is on board so quickly. “Right. It would supplement the community aspect of MusicLand, not replace it. We’d also have a whole new revenue stream, because we’d be selling the device as well as collecting income from subscriptions. I think this might definitely be the bump we need to get our Series A funding, and if all goes well, we can talk about an IPO in the next year or two.”

Cameron is still smiling, but her expression is softer now. “Hey, Donna—I’m not sure I ever really told you, but you’re, like, really, really good at this.”

Donna is startled enough by this statement that her mouth literally hangs open for a second. “Um. Thank you?” No, in fact, she doesn’t think that Cameron has ever said anything quite like this to her before, and she’s shocked at the ridiculous rush of joy that it seems to give her.

Cam shrugs a little. “You’ve always had great ideas and great instincts. I mean, Community was the thing that saved Mutiny, and I couldn’t see that for a really long time. I’m glad you’re my partner.”

Donna can’t think of what to say for a moment. After everything they’ve been through, after where they are now, does Cameron’s acknowledgement of her professional competence really mean so much to her? Apparently so. “Well, let’s just hope that this idea has legs. We’ll need to hire someone right away for R&D, to figure out the best plan for creating a prototype.”

They talk more about who might be right for that job, and what their timeframe should be. After Cameron leaves to head over to the Phoenix building, Donna is so shot with energy that she can’t stop smiling all afternoon.

 

**§§§**

That night, they’ve just finished watching an episode of _Star Trek: Voyager_ when Donna decides to float another idea to Cameron. “I’m thinking about stepping down from Symphonic as managing partner. It’ll make it simpler if we want them to give us a Series A, less conflict of interest. But more to the point, if we grow MusicLand the way we’re talking about doing, I really just won’t be able to keep doing both. You know that; you said it to me awhile ago.” Donna watches Cameron carefully to see what she thinks about this.

“That’s . . . I mean, it’s great for Phoenix, of course, but is it really what you want? Symphonic means a lot to you. You worked for years to get there.” Cameron looks and sounds conflicted.

“It does, but I’m not quitting. I’ll still be a partner, and I’ll still have a lot to say about the direction of the firm. But if I have to choose between Symphonic and Phoenix, there’s no choice for me. Phoenix is ours.” Donna watches as Cameron’s face softens at that, all anxiety gone.

“Good, because there’s no way I can do it without you.” Cameron leans over to give Donna a kiss, and for awhile there is no more talking at all.

After an extensive and enjoyable makeout session, Donna remembers something else that she had wanted to ask Cameron. “Do you know what I think we should do?”

Cameron grins at her wickedly, and Donna laughs. “Not that. Well, yes that, but that isn’t what I was about to say. What would you think about having a dinner party this Saturday? I thought maybe we could invite Diane and Bos, and maybe Trip and Tanya. They’re all really involved in the business end of MusicLand, and I thought we could tell them about the portable MP3 player idea, and maybe I could mention that I’m thinking about stepping down as managing partner of Symphonic, to see what they think. Anyway, what about it?”

“It’s fine with me. I’m surprised that you want to invite Trip. I thought you hated him.” Cam is giving her a funny little half-smile.

“Well, I don’t hate him anymore. He’s not my favorite person, but I do think you’re right that he and Tanya have something going on, so I’d feel weird about just inviting her. Anyway, Trip is the most likely person to become managing partner if I step down, so I think giving him an advance heads up would be polite.” Donna is a little surprised and pleased that Cameron is so agreeable about the idea of a dinner party; it would be their first thing like that as a couple.

Cameron is nodding, her mind clearly already focusing on the details of the evening itself. “That all makes sense to me. What should we make for dinner? I want it to be great.”

 

**§§§**

They decide on roast chicken—easy, basic enough for Bos’s palate, comforting on a cold autumn night. They make it together, with Donna in charge of the chicken itself (she stuffs the cavity with lemon and rosemary) and Cameron making mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and green beans with slivered almonds. When the guests begin to arrive, the house smells and sounds like a holiday. (Donna notices that Cameron and Diane exchange unusually warm smiles, and she wonders about it.)

When everyone is finally seated around the table, Donna surveys the group almost sentimentally. Every person in the room has given something important to help push Phoenix forward. She doesn’t want to make a big speech, but she hears something approaching one coming out of her mouth nonetheless. “I don’t want to hold you all hostage here, but I just want to say a couple of things.” Donna sees Cameron smiling and rolling her eyes simultaneously, which makes Donna smile herself. “You’ve all been so important to the success of MusicLand, and Cameron and I are both incredibly grateful to you for that. We have some exciting ideas about MusicLand’s future that we’ll be talking to all of you about soon, and we’d love your feedback. Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Now, let’s get to the eating part of the dinner!” Everyone laughs, and Donna and Cameron go into the kitchen to carry out the platters of food to the table.

“I love those slivered almonds,” Bos says, dishing himself a generous portion of the green beans. “Cam made this?” He shoots Cameron an astonished look, shaking his head in disbelief.

Cam shrugs. “Jesus, you’d think I couldn’t boil water. All I had to do was throw some beans into a pot, cook them, and add butter and almonds when they were done. Any idiot could do it.”

Bos is grinning at her. “Good thing you’re not just any idiot, then. These beans are dee-licious.”

Cameron snorts but can’t completely hide her pleasure at the compliment, and Donna glances at Bos appreciatively. She’s so glad that Cam has Bos in her life, even more since Cameron confessed some of the details about her father. Cameron can never get back what she’s lost, but having someone as loving and supportive as Bos has to make some of that better for her.

Trip is gobbling up his chicken as though he hasn’t eaten for weeks, and he starts talking before he’s finished swallowing. “So what’s the exciting new idea for MusicLand? You’re not going to make us wait until we’re back in the office, are you?”

Everyone laughs, and Donna glances at Cameron to see what she thinks. Cam shrugs and nods. “Well, we’re thinking of going in a hardware direction.” She explains the concept of a portable MP3 player, one that would store music on a small internal hard drive and be small enough to be carried around in a pocket.

Tanya is the first to react. “That’s . . . that’s an amazing idea. There’s nothing like that on the market now. If we could get there first, it would be huge. It would make MP3 music so much more versatile.” Her eyes are shining, the possibilities of the future obvious in her expression.

Even Trip looks impressed. “Not bad.”

Tanya shoots him a look. “ ‘Not bad’? That’s what you have to say? If it works out, it’ll kill CDs and completely reshape the music industry. How many ideas like that have you had lately?”

Trip grins at her. “So many that I’ve lost count.” He doesn’t seem the slightest bit irritated by Tanya’s remark; in fact, it seems to please him.

Tanya rolls her eyes and ignores him. “Do you have a development timeframe in mind? We really need to be first to market with this, and I’ll bet other companies are working on something similar. It’s the obvious next step—well, obvious now that you’ve told me about it.”

Donna frowns. “We still need to work all that out. We’ll need to hire at least a couple of new engineers who are exclusively devoted to the portable, and of course we’ll also need a project manager for the new division.” She stops, a little overwhelmed at the enormity of everything that lies ahead for Phoenix.

Diane seems to read something of that in her expression. “That’s going to be a lot on your plate, along with everything that’s going on at Symphonic these days.” Her tone is neutral, but her eyes reflect concern.

Donna takes a breath; if she tells this group about her plans to step down as managing partner, the whole thing will be real in a way that she isn’t sure she’s ready for yet. She sees Cam looking at her as though she understands exactly how hard this is for Donna, and that look is the thing that pushes her forward. “I’m . . . planning on stepping down as managing partner of Symphonic, so I can concentrate more on growing MusicLand.”

Fork freeze midway to mouths as everyone seated around the table looks at her. Predictably, Trip is the first to comment, but his expression is a strange one. “That . . . should really be good for you.”

Donna can’t help giving him a skeptical look. Since when does Trip care about what’s good for her? “It’ll be really good for you too, Trip; I’m pretty sure that all of the partners are going to agree that you’re the best choice for the position.”

The odd expression on Trip’s face intensifies, and he glances at Tanya before responding. “So, the thing is . . . I don’t want to be managing partner.”

Donna is stunned; this is the last sentence that she ever thought she’d hear Trip utter. “Why not? You’ve always wanted to be managing partner.”

Trip sighs. “Yeah, I did, but . . . Tanya and I are sort of seeing each other now. It’s working because I’m not her direct supervisor, but it wouldn’t work if I were. I . . . don’t want to give that up.” Trip is focusing intently on his food, and Donna finds what he has just said unexpectedly endearing. Tanya’s eyes are soft.

Suddenly, Cameron is speaking. “What if . . . what if Tanya came to work at Phoenix full time? I mean, she’d be the perfect project manager for the portable. And that way, Trip wouldn’t be her supervisor, even if he became managing partner at Symphonic.” All at once, Cam seems to realize that she and Donna probably should have discussed this before she blurted out a job offer in front of everyone, and she gives Donna a rueful look. Donna is indeed briefly startled, but only for an instant. Tanya would, in fact, be the perfect project manager for the portable—it’s a brilliant idea. Cam looks vastly relieved at what she’s apparently reading in Donna’s expression.

Tanya, for her part, looks a little overwhelmed at all of these developments. “I . . . I don’t know what to say. I love MusicLand, and I believe in your ideas. But I’ve worked really hard to get where I am at Symphonic.” She glances at Trip, who touches her hand.

“Just take some time to think about it,” says Trip, his voice unusually gentle. “It’s a big decision.”

Donna studies Trip; there’s clearly more to this guy than she has ever given him credit for having. “Trip is right, Tanya. It’s huge, and you need to do what’s right for you. But we’d love to have you come work for us full time. It’s a risk, putting all your eggs into the basket of a startup like Phoenix. But we believe in ourselves, and I think you could be happy with us.”

Tanya looks over at Trip. “So you . . . you’d really give up being managing partner, for me?” Donna has never heard Tanya’s voice sound quite like this before.

Trips snorts a little, but Donna can see that he does so as a cover more than anything else. “Hey, don’t flatter yourself. It’s only that my mom seemed to like you when my folks came to visit. Hate to disappoint her; she’s had a rough year, what with _Murder, She Wrote_ getting cancelled and all.” He takes a sip of his wine, and everyone laughs as the tension breaks into something a little more comfortable.

“Taking your girl to meet the folks sounds pretty serious to me.” Bos is winking at Trip, who grins back at him. Donna notices that Cameron is looking thoughtful, but she’s also remaining silent as the dinner table conversation gradually shifts over from work and relationships to movies and the political state of the world. Donna is quiet too as she savors everything: her work, her relationship with Cameron, her friends. Life could hardly be better right now.

 

**§§§**

After the guests leave, after Donna and Cameron do the dishes and clean the kitchen, they both flop exhaustedly on the couch, too tired even to attempt to go to bed. Cameron yawns and puts her head on Donna’s shoulder, and Donna absently plays with Cameron’s hair.

“So, I have kind of an idea,” Cam says, looking at Donna a little nervously.

“Yeah? What sort of company do you want us to start?” Donna’s eyes are half-closed, but she’s smiling.

Cameron shakes her head. “Nope, we’ve got our hands full with just the one. This is something that you’re probably going to think is crazy.”

“Try me,” says Donna, thinking that her whole life has become so unrecognizable to earlier versions of herself that absolutely nothing would faze her anymore.

“So, I know that Joanie and Haley are coming home for Thanksgiving, which is great, but what would you think about having it . . . somewhere else?”Cameron is sitting up now and fidgeting a little.

Donna stares at her; whatever this is, it’s not anything that she could have expected. “Somewhere else where?”

Cam hesitates and then blurts it out in a rush. “Like maybe . . . Florida?”

Donna blinks; she honestly can’t imagine what’s going on in Cameron’s mind right now. “Florida? Why?”

Cameron finally looks at her directly. “It’s like this. I . . . I think I want to tell my mother about you. I want you to be there when I do it. I want her to meet Haley and Joanie too, if they’re ok with that.” Cam’s expression is pleading; this plan is obviously important to her, and Donna wonders how long she’s been thinking about it.

Donna sighs. “Oh, Cameron . . . “ She trails off, unable to assemble her thoughts into coherence. _This could be a terrible idea. This could make you miserable just when you’re getting everything together. This has every chance of not ending happily._

“I know what you’re thinking,” says Cam, invading Donna’s thoughts with razor-sharp accuracy. “You think it’s stupid, and you think I’ll probably get hurt. And maybe I will, but I just . . . I don’t know if I’m ever going to have any relationship with my mom at all, but if I can . . . she has to know me. I mean, I can’t tell my father about you, but at least I can tell her.” It’s a pretty big speech for Cameron, and Donna feels the intensity of emotion underlying it.

Even before Cam finishes, Donna knows that this is going to happen whether she wants it to or not, so her mind turns to logistics and planning. “We’ll need to fly, of course, since there’s no time to drive there and back with all of our schedules. Flying over Thanksgiving weekend is a nightmare, but we can manage it. We’ll need to check with the girls, to make sure that they’re ok with the whole thing.” Donna knows that they both will be, of course; they’d do anything for Cameron.

“Oh, of course—if they want to stay here, we can bag the whole thing and do it some other time. I don’t even know if my mom and Len are going to be home for Thanksgiving, actually. All I know is that Nancy’s family won’t be there, because they just come for Christmas. I couldn’t deal with her on top of everything else.” Cameron clutches a throw pillow, looking both relieved and anxious about the fact that this idea of hers might become a reality.

A slightly madcap thought occurs to Donna as she watches Cameron. “Hey, what would you think if we went to Disney World for the weekend, after . . . everything is done? I’ve never been there with the girls, and it might just be a goofy way for all of us to have some fun together. We can pretend that we’re eight years old.”

Cameron is staring at her. “Disney World? Really? We’d have to rent a car . . .”

Donna smiles at her fondly. “We can swing that, I think.”

Donna watches Cameron light up at the thought of this weekend vacation. “Why not? I’ve never been there, either. It sounds like the perfect surreal end to what’s sure to be my weirdest Thanksgiving ever. Also, it’s kind of our anniversary that weekend, right?” Cam says this last bit casually, but Donna’s throat tightens nonetheless. Cameron remembering something like an anniversary is astonishing.

It’s a moment or two before Donna can speak. “Yeah, I guess it is.” She and Cameron smile at each other.

“So, you’ll talk to Joanie and Haley?” Cam looks as though she has more to say, but she’s holding it back.

Donna nods. “I’ll call them tomorrow, and then I’ll start making some reservations.” Donna is still worried about this plan, scared that she’s not going to be able to protect Cameron from the pain of whatever is coming. Still, she’s going to try, and at least, whatever happens, they’ll have Disney World and each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Midterms are coming up pretty soon._ That has a double meaning for my American readers. Don't sit around feeling hopeless. Register! Vote!


	36. Chapter 36

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Cameron grows up.

There are at least a hundred times before their flight that Cameron wishes she could change her mind. Does she _really_ want to give her mother genuine information about her actual life? Is there any point toit at all? Being a mature, confident grownup seems vastly overrated at the moment. But, whatever misgivings that Cam might harbor, the trip somehow seems to have fallen into place. So far, Cameron’s main contribution has been to call her mother and ascertain whether the whole thing was even possible, and that phone call had been plenty difficult enough to give her a pass on everything else. She had come up with the idea of casually telling her mother that she, Donna, and Donna’s daughters would be going to Disney World for Thanksgiving weekend. They could swing by Tallahassee either before or after they head to Orlando, but if that wouldn’t work for her or Len, no big deal. (And thank God she had that convenient Disney World gambit as a hook!) Her mother had sounded a little bewildered (no surprise there) but also happy (and that _was_ something of a surprise, given the fact that their visit almost two years ago could only be categorized as “not great” at best). She and Len had apparently been planning to spend Thanksgiving by themselves, but her mother professed to be delighted to have everyone descend on them to eat turkey. So yeah, it’s happening. Cameron tries hard not to think about it, even though the whole thing was her (probably, almost certainly) dumb-ass idea.

Donna, for her part, seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time doing research about Disney World, trying to figure out the best things to see and the most efficient way to see them. Her frantic web searches and lists are, at least, serving to distract Cam from the visit itself.

“You know, we could just get there and wing it. You don’t need to do all of this.” When Donna stares at her as though she’s grown a second head, Cameron has to smile.

“We’re only going to be there for two days. We can’t waste any time wandering around aimlessly.” Donna bends back over her notes, frowning, and Cameron’s smile turns into a grin. Sometimes Donna is just too much.

“Wandering around aimlessly sounds kind of fun to me.” Cameron knows that she won’t get anywhere with this, but sometimes it amuses her to poke the bear.

Donna ignores her. “Do you think we should allow a whole day for Epcot, or is that too long?”

Cameron shrugs. “Your call. I just want to make sure we can spend plenty of time in Tomorrowland.” When Donna finally looks at her and smiles, Cam can see that she, too, knows that planning the Disney weekend is just a distraction from the real purpose of the trip, a purpose that both of them are facing with trepidation.

 

**§§§**

Joanie calls the Friday before Thanksgiving in the afternoon, when she knows that Donna would be in the office. Cam is glad to hear from her.

“So, mom didn’t tell us too much about your family, just that you wanted to see them and tell them about you guys. Is it going to be . . . bad?” Joanie sounds a little awkward, but that’s to be expected, Cam thinks. The whole damn thing is the very definition of awkward.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. I just hope it’s not going to be bad for you and Haley.” That’s really what Cam is worried about more than almost anything else, especially about Haley. The very last thing that she wants is for Haley to have to witness homophobic crap about people that she loves.

“Don’t worry about us. We want to be there for you and mom. If your mother says anything awful, she’ll be sorry she did.” Joanie utters this last sentence like a protective mother tiger, and Cam has to laugh. For a second, she feels a flash of pity for her mother. Joanie, like Donna, can be formidable.

 

**§§§**

SFO on Wednesday morning is a predictable nightmare, but Donna had splurged on business class for all of them, and at least they’re able to board the plane early and settle into their relatively big, comfortable seats. It’s a direct flight to Tallahassee, and they’ll be staying at an airport hotel overnight before picking up their rental car. (Joanie, flying in from New York, will meet them there.) It’s lucky, Cam thinks, that her mother and Len moved to Tallahassee after spending a few years in that Miami condo; Miami would have been even more of a hassle and a lot farther from Disney World.

When the plane takes off Cameron glances at Donna, who is so engrossed in a book that she doesn’t seem to be aware of anything. Cam feels that familiar flutter of anxiety as the plane gathers itself; she’s not scared enough of flying not to do it when necessary, but she’s never liked it. Right now, she’s thinking about the many, many flights that she’s taken since she first got involved with Cardiff and started her life as an adult: the one from Dallas to San Francisco to grow Mutiny into a nationwide business; from San Francisco to Tokyo, to start her life with Tom; from Tokyo to Las Vegas, for that Comdex to promote Space Bike IV; from Las Vegas to Tokyo, her head filled with the browser project and the terrifying possibility of working with Donna again; and finally, from Tokyo to San Francisco, when she knew that her marriage was over and she hadn’t been sure what lay ahead. Cameron smiles to herself, watching Donna out of the corner of her eye. In a million years, she never would have predicted what her life would end up becoming.

The plane lands uneventfully—Cam’s heart steadies when she feels the reassuring bump that lets her know that they’re on the ground (she’s read that even though planes do have runway accidents, people often survive those)—and she feels Donna squeezing her hand. “You doing ok?”

Cameron nods, grimacing a little. “Yeah. I’m not a fan of flying.”

Donna laughs. “Yeah, I know. Your clutching the arm rest pretty much gave you away.” Cam feels a rush of warmth, grateful to have Donna next to her, _noticing_ her, as she embarks on this ridiculous quest into adulthood.

 

**§§§**

Once they’ve settled into their hotel suite (they have adjoining rooms, Donna and Cam in one and Haley and Joanie in the other), they all decide to order room service and pile into Joanie and Haley’s room to eat and watch television. Room service has always been one of Cameron’s favorite things, and she wonders if Donna knew that when she suggested it.

Haley pops a French fry into her mouth and grins. “So far, this is shaping up to be our best Thanksgiving ever.”

Cameron rolls her eyes. “Well, enjoy it while it lasts. This might just be the highlight.” At least the cheeseburger she’s eating is really good; at this point, Cam is willing to take whatever she can get.

Haley laughs, glances at Cameron, and then appears to sober. “How long has it been since you’ve seen your mom?”

Cam sighs. “Almost two years. The last time was when I went to Florida while you guys were both in Thailand for Christmas.”

“Have you talked to her at all, like, on the phone? Or email?” Haley’s voice is laced with worry, and Cameron finds that both touching and concerning.

Cam snorts at the idea of her mother on the Internet. “Yeah, a couple of times on the phone. I mean, I called her on Mother’s Day and talked for like five minutes, and she called me on my birthday. But we didn’t talk about much, and I sure didn’t tell her about . .. anything.” Cam finds that she’s unconsciously gnawing on her thumbnail. Jesus, she wishes that this whole thing were over and that she was back in California, happily writing her code and living her life.

“What . . . what do you think she’s going to say, when you tell her?” Haley asks this question with tension in her voice, and Cameron can tell how much the whole thing means to her.

“I . . . I really don’t know. But whatever happens, I don’t want you to worry about it. She’s just one person in a pretty big world.” Cam thinks back to how, well, _perfect_ Donna had been when Haley came out to them last year. She hopes that Haley knows how lucky she is to have that sort of thing in her life.

Haley nods, and then unexpectedly comes over to give Cameron a hug. Cam hugs her back, thinking about how lucky _she_ is to have all of this in _her_ life. When it comes down to it, whatever her mother thinks doesn’t matter, because everything she needs is right here.

 

**§§§**

Cameron has trouble falling asleep that night, and she can tell by Donna’s breathing that she’s awake as well. After awhile she hears Donna’s voice, quiet in the darkness. “Are you scared?”

Cameron shifts a little, and she feels Donna pulling her close. “Yeah. I am. Totally. It’s dumb, but I am.”

“It’s not dumb,” says Donna. “There’s nothing scarier than telling someone who you really are.” She doesn’t say anything else, and both of them are silent for a moment.

“Is it getting any better with . . . with your mom?” Cameron asks the question a little hesitantly, because Donna hasn’t really wanted to talk about any of it since it happened. But it’s something that Cam really wants to know.

Donna answers slowly. “Kind of. I mean, we’re both trying, but I know that she still doesn’t understand. In a way, I get it. I was always the center of her world, and she thought she knew everything about me. Now, she thinks she never knew me at all, and she has to sort that out. She will, I think, but it’s going to take time.”

Cameron sighs, wishing she hadn’t made Donna’s life so shitty. As if reading her thoughts, Donna touches Cam’s cheek lightly. “Hey—none of that has anything to do with you personally. You know that, right?”

Cam puts her head on Donna’s chest, feeling her breath in and out. “Yeah, I know. I just wish you didn’t have to deal with it.”

Donna laughs softly. “Well, me too. And I wish you didn’t have to deal with whatever’s going to be happening tomorrow. It’s a hell of a way to spend our first anniversary. Then again, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s exactly the way that we should be spending it.”

That makes Cameron remember something that she’s been thinking about. “Hey, do you think our anniversary is on Thanksgiving, or on November 23?”

“What do you mean? Thanksgiving last year was when I decided that we should start dating, so that’s our anniversary.” Donna sounds a little puzzled by this whole line of inquiry.

“Yeah, I know, I remember. I was cutting those turnips, and then you said you wanted to try.” Cameron can’t help smiling to herself at the memory; it was one of the best days of her life.

“Those turnips were rutabagas, but that’s probably beside the point.” Donna kisses her, and Cameron sighs.

“Yeah, but, see, Thanksgiving is on a different date each year. This year it’s not until the 28th. So was our real anniversary last Saturday?” Privately Cameron thinks that this is why she never pays attention to special dates—they just give her a headache.

“Nope.” Donna says it confidently, as one stating a self-evident fact. “Our anniversary will always be on Thanksgiving morning, preferably when one of us is cutting rutabagas. There’s just too much symbolism there for us to ignore it.”

“Rutabagas are symbolic?” Donna pokes her, and Cameron laughs, forgetting for a moment her anxieties about tomorrow. Soon Donna is asleep, and Cam feels herself dozing too, safe in the comfort of the present, at least for tonight.

 

**§§§**

As it always does no matter what anyone might think about it, the future arrives promptly the next morning,and the four of them are soon driving to Cameron’s mother’s condominium. When they get there, Cam parks the car and turns off the ignition. She and Donna look at each other for a moment. Cameron wonders if Donna is remembering their drive here almost two years ago, and how hard it had been for Cam to convince herself to get out of the car and enter the house. This time, Cam is the one driving the rental car. This time, she’s stronger—or at least, she hopes that she is. This time, she’s going to act like an adult and not like a still-angry teenager.

“Ready for this?” Donna asks.

Cam shrugs. “Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.” She gets out of the car, the rest of them following a little behind. Taking a breath, Cameron rings the doorbell. Here they go.

Her mother opens the door almost too quickly, startling all of them. Cameron never really remembers how small her mother is; she had always loomed so large in Cam’s mind that it’s been easy for her to forget the actual physical details. While this thought is flitting through her head, Len pokes his head over his wife. “Hey, folks!”

Cameron is actually happy to have him there to break the tension. “Hi, Len. Uh, you remember Donna, right? These are her daughters, Haley and Joanie.” Cam rolls her eyes inwardly at the stellar job she’s doing with the introductions.

At that moment Cameron’s mother, apparently remembering that she’s the hostess of a social event, reanimates. “You don’t need to stand in the doorway. Come in!”

The house has the almost maddeningly delicious smell of roasting turkey, and Cameron is suddenly transported back to last year, when she and Donna spent most of Thanksgiving dinner smiling goofily at each other, waiting for everyone else to leave, and imagining whatever might be coming next. Thanksgiving, like all of the holidays, had never been a big deal to Cam after her father died, but now she thinks that it’s probably her number-one favorite day on the calendar. Glancing at Donna, who is laughing at something that Len just told her, and at Haley and Joanie, who are looking around curiously, Cam hopes that nothing that happens today will ruin the holiday for any of them.

Cameron slowly becomes aware that her mother is speaking to her, her voice unusually hesitant. “Catherine . . . it’s really wonderful to have you here, all of you. We really need to do this more.”

Cam feels a little like an asshole, the way any person about to drop a hand grenade into a room of civilians would likely feel. “Yeah,” she mutters, thinking that her mother sounds a lot less critical than she’d sounded two years ago. Maybe things have happened to her in that time that made a difference in her life, they way they had to Cameron. Maybe she’s changed—you never know.

Cam stuffs some cheese and crackers into her mouth, watching the peculiar scene in front of her. Donna and Len are chatting like old friends; Cam had forgotten that they seemed to have bonded during the last visit, and that Donna had told her that she liked him. Even more incredibly, both Joanie and Haley appear to be getting along fine with her mother, who is talking to them about Cameron. Cam finds it all slightly mortifying, but she supposes that things could be worse, and they might well _be_ worse before the visit is over.

“You have to see this,” Cam’s mother says, leaving the living room and returning with a large scrapbook. “I saved all of Catherine’s pictures and articles from when she competed in beauty pageants. Wasn’t she adorable?” Cameron covers her eyes as Joanie and Haley laugh at the pictures. Donna glances at them too, trying not to smile but not doing a very good job of it.

Cameron grows increasingly anxious as the chitchat around her continues. When is she going to say what she came to say? Before dinner? During dinner? After dinner? Why hadn’t she planned this better? It suddenly seems like an impossible task. After all, she and her mother are barely in each other’s lives at all. Why does it matter if she knows a little more about Cameron? Cam starts to feel a wave of nausea, and she pushes it away impatiently. The last thing she needs right now is a full-blown panic attack.

But then, after a round of polite inquires about how their business is going, her mother asks a question that appears to settle both the decision of “when” and of “if.” “Is there anyone special in your life right now?”

Joanie and Haley both freeze, trying not to look at either each other or at Cameron. Donna catches Cam’s eye, and Cam can see how badly she wants to be sitting next to her right now. Cam takes a breath. This is it. Here it goes. “Um, yeah. There is.” She stops, wondering if she’s going to be able to get this out after all.

Hermother visibly brightens. “Tell me all about him. How long have you two been together?”

Fuck. Cam breathes in sharply again. “A year. But . . . I’m with Donna, actually. We’ve been . . . seeing each other. I just wanted you to know that.” Cameron takes a gulp of her wine without tasting it, waiting for whatever reaction might be coming.

Incredibly, the first one to speak is Len, and he’s grinning at both of them. “I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised. But hell, Catherine, you could do a lot worse than this one.”

Cam stares at him, and she sees Donna doing the same. “What do you mean, you’re not surprised?” Of all the things that Cam had thought she was prepared to hear, this was certainly not one of them.

Len is still grinning. “Well, I dunno, it seemed like a possibility when you guys were here two years ago. So, you’ve only been together a year? I guess I’m pretty sharp for an old, out-of-touch geezer.” Seeing that Cameron is still looking at him in astonishment, Len shrugs. “My brother’s gay.”

“Bob is gay?” Cameron has only met him a few times. “Huh.” Her respect for Len is growing by the minute.

Cameron’s mother has been sitting perfectly still, and Len suddenly seems to realize that his wife has yet to respond. “Cheryl?”

Cameron sees that her mother is looking at her with a conflicted expression. “I’m . . . I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to that.”

“You’re supposed to say that it’s great, and that you’re happy for your daughter.” It’s Joanie, sounding more aggressive than is probably strictly necessary, but just as aggressive as Cameron might have expected. Donna shoots Joanie a warning glance, and Joanie doesn’t continue. She’s still glowering, and Cameron tries hard not to smile. Joanie is awesome.

But suddenly, Cam’s mother lets out a sob, and Cameron doesn’t feel like smiling anymore; the last thing she’d ever have expected was that her mother might cry. She’d cried all the time after her father had been killed, cried for years at things large and small. But then, around the time Cam started high school, all that crying suddenly stopped, and Cam doesn’t think she’d ever seen her shed a tear since, until right now. And Jesus, what exactly is there to cry about?

Len goes up to Cheryl and puts his arm around her, but she shakes him away without looking at him. “I’m fine. I’m . . . fine.”

Cam knows that she should say something, but she can’t think of what that might be. Her throat is suddenly tight, and she’s shocked to realize that she actually seems to _care_ about what her mother thinks of her right now. She’s also horrified to find that her eyes are welling up a little; she tries to wipe them with the back of her hand and hope that nobody notices. (Donna does, of course; Donna notices everything. But maybe the rest of them are focused on other things.)

“I just feel . . . I never knew you at all, did I? Were you always . . . ?” Cameron’s mother is groping for words, and Cam feels an unaccustomed flicker of sympathy for her.

“No, not always. Well, maybe always, but I didn’t realize it until . . . well, until . . . Donna.” Cam is flushing and not looking at anyone in the room.

“And . . . and you’re happy?” Cameron’s mother asks it haltingly, as though she might not be permitted to know the answer.

Cam responds to that one immediately. “Yeah, I am. I’m really happy.” She looks right at Donna when she says this. Donna smiles back at her, crosses the room, sits down on the couch next to her, and takes her hand. “I love your daughter very much. We all do.” Cam finds that she can’t say anything, can barely get air to breath, but she squeezes Donna’s hand and looks up at her mother.

“I’m . . . glad you’re all here. Thank you for telling me this.” Cameron’s mother says it softly, more softly than Cam can remember hearing from her for a long, long time. And suddenly, a weight that Cameron hasn’t fully been aware of carrying is gone, leaving her feeling light and clean. This, after all, had been the right thing to do. For once in her life, she seems to have made a good decision.

“I’m glad too.” Cam doesn’t say anything else, but she finds that she means it completely, and saying it to her mother suddenly feels natural and right. Things between the two of them are actually going to be better, Cam realizes. Maybe not perfect, probably never perfect, but better. And better is more than she ever thought she’d get.

At that moment, Cam hears Len saying something. “I hate to be that guy, but the turkey’s ready for carving. Anyone hungry?”

They all are, and talk gradually shifts to other, easier topics as the group laughs and starts eating what turns out to be a feast. Cameron looks around and finds it hard to keep from beaming at everyone like a dork. Yes, this is indeed apparently the perfect way to spend their first anniversary. As if reading her mind, Donna looks at her and smiles, and Cameron grins back at her. She doesn’t mind being a dork, as long as Donna is there to dork along with her.

 

**§§§**

The two days that they spend in Disney World are an embarrassing amount of fun for all of them. Donna’s obsessive planning, Cameron has to admit, turns out to be useful, even though Donna eventually agrees (grudgingly) to let them have a couple of hours each day to wander around and be spontaneous. The weather is perfect, and Cameron can’t remember having ever experienced such pure joy in a vacation before; in fact, in a life composed of work and the occasional business trip, she can’t really recall the last time she took an actual vacation.

Even with Donna’s exhaustive notes, they still all bicker a little about how much time to spend in the different attractions. Donna, Cameron, and Haley are fascinated by Tomorrowland, which bores Joanie; Joanie rolls her eyes at Epcot (“You all get that these aren’t real countries, right?”), but Donna loves it.Cam considers Space Mountain to be well worth waiting on line for a second go, but the others think that once is more than enough. They all agree that the “Ellen’s Energy Adventure Show” is surprisingly good—it probably doesn’t hurt, Cam thinks, that it stars Ellen DeGeneres and Jamie Lee Curtis, as well as Bill Nye the Science Guy. Throughout it all, Cameron finds herself relishing the bickering, because it makes the four of them seem like the most normal of families. What, after all, is more apple pie than a trip to Disney World and fights about what to see? She never thought that she’d be part of anything like this, and she’s not about to take any part of it for granted.

On Saturday night, they all watch the “Remember the Magic Parade,” which celebrates Disney World’s 25th anniversary. Suddenly, amid the fireworks and the medley of other Disney songs, Cameron hears the band start to play “A Whole New World.” She and Donna look at each other, knowing that they are both thinking the same thing. How did they get to this place? Why did things manage to work out in ways that they’ve never really worked out before? How did they get _this_ lucky? Donna puts her arm around Cam’s shoulder, and Cameron takes Donna’s hand. She notices that Haley is looking at them both quizzically. “You really like Aladdin that much?”

Donna nods, apparently unable to speak, and Cam feels a little prickle of tears as she answers. “Yeah, we really do.”

 

**§§§**

That night, when they’re lying in the hotel bed, Cameron thinks about the weekend, about how surprisingly well her mother took the revelation, about how odd it is that a mere three days can pack in so many emotions. It’s over now; they’ll have to leave the hotel early in the morning to catch their flights back home. (Joanie will be flying directly back to New York, and the rest of them will return to San Francisco.) Cameron is content—more than content, she tells herself. Things went better with her mother than she had dared hope, and she genuinely thinks that the two of them have turned a real corner in their relationship. Everything is as good as it could possibly be. And yet, and yet . . .

Cam suddenly thinks about what Joe had told her about his therapist, and how much it all seems to have helped him. Cameron herself would never go to any shrink; she can’t imagine trusting an uncaring stranger with things that she can barely bring herself to tell Donna. Still, something about that conversation seems to be swirling around inside Cam’s head, and she sits straight up in bed as it finally makes its way to the surface. She knows what she wants to do, even if it that thing is, objectively, mildly insane.

As usual, Donna has an uncanny knack for reading her mind. “Hey. You ok?”

Cameron hesitates; she really has no guess as to how Donna will react to what she’s about to tell her. “Yeah, but . . . what would you think if I just took a little side trip before going back to California?”

“A side trip? Where do you want to go?” Donna sounds puzzled, and Cameron can hardly blame her for that.

“Dallas. I want . . . I want to go visit my father’s grave.” That’s all she says, and to her relief she sees that the confusion in Donna’s expression immediately falls away.

“Do you want me to come too?” Donna would do that, Cam thinks to herself in wonderment. She’d actually drop everything in her life to fly to Dallas with Cameron on a whim, just because she thinks that Cam might need her there.

“No, not this time. I think I need to go there by myself. I . . . haven’t seen the grave since the funeral, actually. I never wanted to, but I do now.” Cam can see that she doesn’t need to explain anything beyond that, because Donna, as always, understands what she’s trying to say.

“Ok. You should be able to exchange your ticket without any problem.” They discuss logistics for a little while, and eventually Cameron can tell that Donna has fallen asleep. Cam doesn’t; she lies awake for the rest of the night, amazed at her own impulsive decision. Will she really be back in Dallas tomorrow?

 

**§§§**

Everything goes more smoothly the next day than Cameron could have imagined: the ticket is exchanged, and a seat on a direct flight to Dallas is secured. By 2:00 the next afternoon she finds herself checking into a different hotel, renting another car, and driving toward the cemetery that she had avoided visiting the entire time she lived in Dallas. Still, she has no problem at all finding her father’s grave; its exact location is one of the many things that seem to have been forever burned into her memory.

 **Cameron Howe  
** **Beloved Husband and Father  
** **July 7, 1939 - September 21, 1971**

Cameron shivers when she reads it. For some reason, it hadn’t dawned on her that she would be seeing her own name carved into the stone, and she has to admit that she finds that a little creepy. (It’s just as well that Donna hadn’t come with her; she’d undoubtedly have found it even creepier.) Studying the date, Cam touches the cold stone and does some quick mental subtraction. Her father, she realizes, had been younger than she is now when he died.  
****

Now that Cameron is here, she’s not exactly sure how to start, or what to say; given the name on the stone, she’s not even certain if she’s about to talk to her father or to herself. Feeling somewhat foolish, Cam sits down, leans her back against the grave, closes her eyes, and lets her mind drift toward the father that she remembers.

_Hey. I just . . . I’ve missed you._

(She feels him then, even though she can’t see or hear him. He’s there somehow, listening to her right now.)

_I want you to know who I’ve turned into. I write computer code. You don’t know what that is; there weren’t really computers for regular people when you died, not like there are now. But I can create things out of nothing, and those things change people’s lives. I’m good at it. I wish I could show them to you. I run a business, and it’s doing pretty well. I’m learning to cook, and I actually kind of like it. I have a real family, even though it’s one that I’ve sort of cobbled together over the years. I have a great life right now._

(He’s proud of her, she can tell that, she knows.)

 _I also . . . there’s something else I need to tell you. I’m in love with a woman. I mean, like,_ really _in love with her._

(She waits, but she feels nothing at all, and she has no choice but to continue.)

_She’s good for me. We had to go through a lot of stuff to get where we are, but we finally both made it here. It sounds cheesy, but she makes me a better version of myself, better than I’ve ever been before. I wish you could meet her. I know you probably don’t like the idea, and maybe you don’t understand it, but I’m still me. I still love you, and I hope you still love me. But even if you don’t, I always will. Love is love._

(And suddenly, she feels an explosion of pure peace, as if she’s floating in a universe of warmth and acceptance, as though everyone she’s ever loved in her life has no option but to love one another. Love is love is love is love is love. It’s just a flickering moment, and it evaporates almost instantly, but it’s something that she remembers for the rest of her life, like a lost chord of perfect music.)

Cameron opens her eyes, touches the headstone that bears her name, and traces the dates of her father’s life with her index finger. She bends down to kiss the stone lightly, and then turns to walk back toward the car. It’s time to go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic could end here, of course, and possibly it should: it's Donna and Cameron's anniversary; they've had real character arcs that let them grow and change; and they're both in a pretty good place right now. It feels like a natural breaking point, and a sensible person would cut bait and call it a day. But they're not exactly where I want to leave them, and there's a little more story that I have to tell. So buckle up for the final act, and let's hope it hangs together!


	37. Chapter 37

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein time passes.

_February 1997_

The fact that Tanya decides to leave Symphonic and accept a position as Phoenix's Chief Technical Officer (focusing on developing an MP3 handheld device to be ready for market within the next eighteen months) makes it easier for Donna to step down as managing partner than she had feared. After that, two things happen in quick succession: Symphonic grants Phoenix Series A funding to develop the handheld, and they also offer the position of managing partner to Trip, who, free of the complicating factor of his relationship with Tanya, accepts without reservation.

At a Symphonic office gathering commemorating these new developments, Trip, a flute of champagne in hand, approaches Donna with a grin. “Thought you’d never really leave.”

Donna shakes her head at him, amused. “Yeah, lucky for you, I did. Just don’t mess everything up that I’ve done here.”

In one of those tonal shifts of his that continually catch Donna off guard, Trip suddenly sobers. “Donna—what you’ve done here has been amazing. It’s really changed the way I think about the work that we do, and it’s made me kind of, well, _different_. I hope I can be half the managing partner that you were.”

Donna tilts her head; however unexpected this declaration might be, Trip does seem to be sincere in what he’s just said. “Thanks, Trip. You’re going to be great.”

Trip shrugs, half smiles, and doesn’t answer. “Hey, Tanya seems to be having a blast working on the MP3 player. It’s all she can talk about.”

Donna smiles back at him. “It was an incredible break for us, getting her as our CTO. She’s taking a risk, and I hope it pays off for all of us.”

“It will,” says Trip, confident as ever. “I mean, Tanya’s there now to clean up all of your mistakes. Lucky for you she’s so crazy about me that she decided to save you guys from yourselves.”

Donna can’t help laughing at that. Now that she’s become used to the cadence of Trip’s mocking form of humor, she actually enjoys it. “We’ll see. Meanwhile, we’ll do our best to save her from you.”

Trip tips his glass of champagne at her, grinning broadly. “Good luck with that.”

 

_April 1997_

Haley comes home for dinner one early spring night, and Cameron immediately knows that something is wrong. She sees Donna looking anxious, clearly picking up on it as well.

Haley takes a breath, apparently wanting to get through whatever is on her mind as quickly as possible. “So, I just wanted you guys to know . . . Jordan and I sort of broke up.”

Genuinely startled, Cameron glances quickly at Donna. As far as either of them knew, everything between Jordan and Haley was going well. Cam wonders what could have happened to change that.

Haley shrugs at the questions that she sees in their eyes. “It wasn’t a fight, or anything like that. Jordan just found out that she got into USC as a transfer, so she’ll be going there next year. It’s great for her, since she really wants to do something with film as a career, but we just decided that with her in LA and me here, it just probably couldn’t work. We’re still friends.” Haley is looking at her plate now instead of at them, and Cameron can’t gauge just how she’s really feeling about all of this. Breaking up with your first love is a lot, no matter how amicable it might have been.

Cameron can see that Donna is fighting with herself to be casual, because that’s what Haley wants right now. “That sounds smart. Long distance relationships are hard.”

Haley nods. “Yeah. We’ll probably still see each other a lot, and we’ll definitely talk and email. I mean, people don’t usually stay with their first girlfriend forever, right?” She takes another half-hearted bite of the linguine and clam sauce that Cam knows she usually loves, and then puts down her fork with half of the food on her plate uneaten. “I really better get back to campus—I’ve got a problem set due tomorrow, and I want to go over it again.”

After she leaves, Cameron goes to Donna and gives her a hug, and Donna closes her eyes for a moment. “I wish I had a magic shield to keep Joanie and Haley safe from every bad feeling and every bad thing forever.”

Cam feels a pang; she knows that Haley will be fine, that she’s a lot more fine than she might have been, but it still sucks. “If you ever figure that magic shield thing out, that’s our next company.” Donna smiles and squeezes Cameron’s hand.

 

_June 1997_

Early that summer, Donna’s parents come for a visit for the first time since they learned about Donna and Cameron the previous year. Donna spends a full month of anxiety preparing for the visit mentally, physically, and emotionally. She knows that the whole thing is driving Cameron crazy, no matter how patient she’s trying to be.

“It’s going to be fine,” Donna says, more to assure herself than Cameron. “They’ll barely be here for a week.”

Cam tries to smile reassuringly but ends up rolling her eyes, and Donna has to laugh. She can’t believe that, at her age, she’s worrying this much about seeing her parents again.

In point of fact, the visit actually goes better than Donna’s worst fears, although not quite as well as her secret hopes. Her mother never says anything overtly nasty to Cameron, but she also never relaxes in her presence, either. Her father, who had always been surprisingly more open to the idea of Cameron in the first place, jokes around with Cam and even takes her out one afternoon to teach her to play golf (he comes back saying that Cam is a natural, with a lot better swing than Gordon ever had). When she isn’t working, Cameron spends the week hanging out with Donna’s father, trying to be as polite as possible to Donna’s mother, and watching Donna intently for any signs of self-combustion. When the week ends and Donna’s parents are safely on a flight back to Dallas, Donna and Cam collapse on the couch in exhaustion and relief.

Cameron is the first to speak. “This whole thing reminded me of all of those visits with Tom’s family. They kind of hated me, too.”

Donna looks at her. “My parents didn’t hate you. I mean, my dad really seemed to love you, and my mom—it’s not you, it’s just the _idea_ of you.”

Cam smiles a little. “I guess that’s better. Tom’s family hated the _actual_ me.”

Donna kisses her. “Tom’s family were idiots.”

 

_September 1997_

In late summer, Cameron’s mother calls Cam on the phone to suggest (shyly) that the two of them take a weekend trip somewhere together. Cam panics at the idea but says that she’ll think about it. She hesitates a little before mentioning it to Donna, but in the end she really wants to know what Donna thinks.

Donna’s reaction is predictable. “You should do it. She’s trying, and that’s a lot. You might really get something out of it, but even if you don’t, it’s only one weekend.”

Cam sighs, knowing that Donna is probably right but not liking the idea anyway. Still, she ends up calling her mother back and agreeing to a beach weekend on the Florida coast. The decide to go the weekend after Labor Day, when the rates are cheaper and, more importantly, the beaches are emptier.

The weekend turns out a lot better than Cameron had thought it would. Even though her mother can’t seem to help suggesting alternate haircuts and clothes for Cam to consider, they stillactually find things to talk about, easy things like funny stories about her father and Cameron’s life in Silicon Valley. Her mother, it turns out, is very interested in music and a big fan of 1960s classic rock, so she finds the idea of MusicLand fascinating. Since Len has a computer that’s connected to the Internet, Cam promises to email them information about subscribing. (Having her mother subscribe to MusicLand, Cam thinks, is just another bizarre thing to add to her growing list.)

On the last night, the two of them are sitting on the deck of the cottage that they had rented, watching the ocean. Cameron’s mother, not looking at Cam, suddenly says something unexpected. “I’m going to try to call you Cameron from now on. After all, it’s who you are.”

Cam looks at her quickly. “You . . . you don’t have to do that. I know it’s weird, with Dad and all.”

Cam’s mother looks down at her hands, which are currently holding a glass of lemonade. “I like that you’re keeping him alive. You’re a lot more like him than I ever realized.”

Since that’s just about the best thing that her mother could have said to her, Cam bites her lip and doesn’t answer. Her mother smiles at her, and they have the sort of moment of understanding that Cameron can’t remember ever sharing before.

 

_May 1998_

One evening while they’re both working on laptops in bed, Donna realizes that Cameron has been transfixed on the same web page on her laptop for quite awhile. “What are you staring at?”

Cameron moves over a little and pushes the laptop toward Donna, so they both can see it. “There’s this new site called fanfiction.net—I kind of can’t stop playing with it.”

 

Donna studies the screen, not getting it. “What’s fan fiction?”

“People write stories about stuff that they’re fans of—TV shows, books, movies, comic books, whatever. It’s kind of cool.” Donna sees that Cameron has that expression of pure, focused concentration that she can get when something really captivates her, but Donna still doesn’t exactly understand what she’s talking about.

Seeing Donna’s blank look, Cameron tries again. “They write stuff about the characters—things they think might have happened, or things they wish happened. I just read one for Star Trek about Picard and Crusher, by someone who really, REALLY wanted them to be a serious romantic couple.”

Donna is starting to see it, finally. “Huh. Picard and Crusher? Kind of boring. Maybe Crusher and Troi would be less boring.”

Cameron grins. “Yeah. You should write that.”

Donna snorts at her. “Sure, in all my spare time, I’ll get right on that.”

Cam’s grin is even broader. “Do you remember how you dressed up as Crusher the Halloween before we started this whole thing?”

Donna gives her a curious look. “Sure, I remember that. You said you liked it.”

“I did like it. I liked it a lot, in fact. Do you still have it?” Cam’s eyes are sparkling now.

“I think so. Why? Oh . . .” Donna suddenly sees where this is going, and she laughs.

“Yeah. Maybe tonight, you could put it on.” Cam, turning away from her fan fiction site, is now focused entirely on Donna.

“I can do that, as long as you promise not to write about it later.” Donna is amused by this whole thing, but she’s more than willing to play along.

“No deals. We’ll have to see how convincing you are.” Cam leans over to kiss her.

“I can be . . . very convincing.” Donna’s voice is mock-sultry, and Cameron smirks back at her.

 

_June 1998_

Following more tech press coverage than either Donna or Cam hoped for at their most optimistic, Musicland2Go is released worldwide in mid-June. The standalone MP3 player is an instant success: MusicLand subscriber numbers skyrocket almost overnight, and Phoenix’s hardware suppliers can barely keep up with the demand for the device. Almost overnight, MusicLand goes from being a relatively small company known mostly to techies with a strong interest in music to becoming a nationally known corporation. Tech bloggers predict that an IPO for the company is only a matter of months.

Exciting as it is, Cameron finds herself a little overwhelmed by it all. She tries to figure out how to explain this odd ambivalence of hers to Donna one night as they’re going to bed. “It just sort of feels like everything is getting a little bit out of our control, you know? I mean, I know this is what we wanted to happen, but I just . . .” Caught off guard by the wave of fear washing through her, Cam finds she can’t continue.

Donna, as she usually can, is able to put Cameron’s feelings into words better than Cam ever could. “I know. It’s great, but it also means that . . . well, that we’re moving through the cycle, right? We can’t stay on top forever.” She sighs, and Cameron feels a little bad for dragging her down with this.

Cam hates what she’s thinking, but she says it nevertheless. “It also makes me think about Mutiny, and how it all . . .”

Donna interrupts, putting her arm around Cameron as she does so. “This isn’t going to be the same. Whatever happens with Phoenix, we’re not going anywhere. We’re the important things this time around.”

“Yeah?” Cam squints at Donna, hoping that these worries have no foundation at all. “Ok. You’re older than I am. You probably have it all figured out.”

“I do,” Donna smiles back at her. “Let’s just be happy that the player is doing so well, and we can worry about tomorrow . . . tomorrow.”

Cam closes her eyes, enjoying the sound of Donna’s confidence. As always, she’s just fine with the plan of putting off anxiety about the future for another day.

 

_November 1998_

Trip casually mentions the new search engine during one of their partner meetings. “It’s called Google, and there’s a lot of buzz about it. Started by a couple of grad students at Stanford, and it looks pretty good. We need to keep an eye on this one.”

“Grad students at Stanford again?” Donna says, shaking her head, thinking about how a couple of other grad students effectively crushed both Rover and Comet just four years earlier. Apparently Haley had chosen her school well.

Trip nods, giving her a half-grin. “Yeah. I don’t think they’re interested in VC funding at the moment; they just got a chunk of seed money from Sun Microsystems. Still, we should be prepared to jump if they change their minds. If they take money from anyone else in this town, I want it to be from us.”

Donna shows the Google site to Cameron after dinner that night, and Cam is predictably fascinated by it. “I read about this search engine in the _Mercury_ last month. It’s really different from anything that’s come out before.”

Donna looks at the site, admiring its clean design. “What did you hear about it?”

“It doesn’t just crawl through key words to produce results—it uses an algorithm that ranks the importance of web pages based on how many other sites link to those pages. It’s a whole new thing.” Cam is shaking her head in admiration. “It’s going to kill every other algorithmic search engine out there, and it’ll probably end up destroying Yahoo for good measure.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “I won’t weep at Yahoo’s funeral.”

Cameron grins back at her. “Me either. But this is . . . I remember arguing with Joe about Comet and Rover, when he said that algorithms could never provide the human touch that he was building his company on. I told him that they couldn’t do that _yet_ , but I don’t think he ever thought it could happen. But now it has; this one is an algorithm based on human choice.” Donna knows how important that idea is to Cameron, that in some sense everything she has ever created is a conversation between technology and humanity.

“It’s amazing,” Donna says, staring again at the screen. “I wonder where everything will be ten years from now.” They both fall silent, trying to imagine the wonders of the future.

 

_December 1998_

Phoenix goes public the week before Christmas. The morning that it opens, Donna and Cameron sit together, not touching, silently staring at the stock ticker on the screen in front of them. Cameron has never seen Donna looking quite this tense before, at least not in a professional context. Cam herself finds that she can barely breathe as she looks at the numbers crawling in front of them.

“It opened at 13. That’s good, right?” Cam looks at Donna for confirmation.

Donna nods slightly, not looking at her. “It’s . . . really good. Now we just need to see if that number goes up or down.”

They don’t say much for the rest of the day, just watch the numbers, drink beer, and eat the junk food that Donna had the foresight to buy (whether the news were good or bad, neither of them would feel like cooking and eating anything real until it was over). At the end of the day, Phoenix closes at 21, and Cameron and Donna regard each other in shock. No matter how hopeful they were, no matter how much they believed in MusicLand, they never expected numbers like these.

Cameron, who never thinks she cares about money, who has felt a curious ambivalence about the IPO ever since they started the process of going public, feels an unexpected shot of joy. They’ve made it. This is the big time. This is . . . everything.

Donna is looking over at her, and she actually has tears in her eyes. “Cameron . . . this is incredible.”

Cam tries to answer her in a steady voice. “I guess . .I guess people like us.” She doesn’t say anything else, but her heart is full at the idea of all of those people _believing_ in what she and Donna have created together.

Donna is looking at Cam now with a soft expression. “So I guess we’re officially rich now.”

Cam tilts her head. “Weren’t we rich before?”

“Before we were comfortable. Now we can go out and buy a DeLorean.” Donna looks as though she can’t quite believe that this is really happening to them.

“It’s not just us—everyone who works for us, everyone who has share in Phoenix, they all got a lot of money today. I mean, Tanya’s rich now, too; she didn’t lose out, coming to work for us.” Cam feels vastly relieved as she says this; she’s always worried about their employees, more than she ever has admitted outright. The coders slaved away to make MusicLand what it became, and they deserve a reward that they can actually deposit in the bank.

Donna, if possible, looks even more incandescent than she did just moments ago. “Yeah. That’s almost the best part of all of this, isn’t it?”

Cameron nods, but for some reason, probably because simple, basic happiness is often beyond her abilities, she’s also suddenly recalling the day more than ten years ago when Mutiny went public, when the stock tanked, when everything that Donna had thought was going to happen went resoundingly in the opposite direction, when Cam and Donna ended up with no company and no friendship and nothing to show for the work they’d put into building up Mutiny out of nothing. Cam tries to shove that memory aside; it has no place here, right now, today. Today is Phoenix, not Mutiny. Today she has Donna, and a product that she loves, and a company that the world has decided to anoint. Today, she’s going to let herself just enjoy it.

Donna is picking up their empty bottles of beer and surveying the half-filled bags of Doritos and Oreos. “Are you too drunk for champagne right now?”

Cam grins, finding that “enjoying it” is coming easier and easier to her. “Even if I am, let’s go for it.”

 

_February 1999_

As soon as Donna answers the phone late one night, she can tell from Joanie’s first “hey” that something good has happened. First, Joanie asks Donna to have Cam pick up on another extension. As soon as they’re both there, listening attentively, Donna hears Joanie taking a big, dramatic breath. “So . . . you know that _New York Times_ photojournalism internship that I applied for? I sort of got it. I heard today.” Joanie pauses, waiting for their reaction.

Cameron is the first to give one to her by letting out a yell that hurts Donna’s ears. “That is so freaking awesome!”

Donna feels a sting of tears that she’s very glad that Joanie can’t see; she’s so proud that she can barely speak. “Honey, that’s wonderful. All those applicants! I’m so happy for you.” _You’re going to have a wonderful life,_ she thinks to herself. _I don’t have to worry about that anymore._ The relief that she feels at the thought almost overwhelms her.

Joanie is chattering, the eye-roll that Donna usually hears in almost everything she says completely absent right now. “It starts in September, so I’ll have the summer to travel after I graduate. I’m thinking that I want to stay in the US this time, maybe do a big cross-country trip and really see everything. I mean, if I’m going to be a journalist here, I want to see people all over the country.”

Cam is grinning into the phone so hard that Donna wonders if her face might literally crack in half. “That’s a great idea. Hey, maybe you should rent a truck and a trailer and do it that way. Could be a lot more fun and comfortable than camping in a tent or staying in motels.” They talk about that idea for awhile, and Donna basks in the warm feeling that she always gets when she listens to the easy shorthand that Cam has with her daughters, the evidence of how much they all love each other.

_September 1999_

Cam has heard about Napster, of course, but it’s Haley who really brings it to her attention. “Everyone at school is starting to use it,” she tells Cam one night on the phone. “I mean, it’s getting really huge.”

Cam thinks about that for a second, wondering if Napster is going to be any serious threat in the competitive landscape of online music. She tries to remember what she’d heard about the site. “It’s a file sharing thing, right?”

“Yeah, people share MP3 files with each other, so the more people who use it, the bigger and better it gets. It’s really easy to find the music that you want and download it, easier than it ever has been before.” Haley sounds a little nervous as she’s describing it; she knows full well the potential effect that a free, infinite digital jukebox could have on MusicLand.

“Well, there’s the little matter of copyright infringement,” Cam says, trying to quell the waves of anxiety she’s suddenly feeling. “None of that is remotely legal.”

“True,” Haley answers. “My friends kind of like that, actually—you know, the idea of sticking it to the man and setting music free for everyone to enjoy. But yeah, I can’t believe that the RIAA will let this thing go on forever.”

Cameron has the uncomfortable realization that, fifteen years ago, she would undoubtedly have been one of these kids, stealing music and gleeful about getting away with it. Now she _is_ the man; now her own business is at stake. “I guess we’ll have to keep an eye on it and hope that everyone realizes that if you don’t pay artists for their work, art won’t get made.”

“Yeah,” Haley says, sounding doubtful. “It’ll all probably be fine.”

“I’m sure it will. I mean, it’s not even really a company; it’s just a kid providing a service to other kids.” Still, Cam makes a mental note to talk about Napster with Donna today, to see what she thinks about the whole thing.

 

_November 1999_

It takes Donna and Cameron a couple of years to climb aboard the _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ train, but when they do, they find that they never want to get off of it. They spend the summer of 1999 gobbling up the DVDs for the first three seasons, and when season four starts in October, Tuesday evenings quickly become one of the highlights of their week.

Donna feels as though she’s probably not Buffy’s target demographic—she’s forty-five, after all!—but she doesn’t care. There’s something about this show, with its mixture of humor and pathos, with its kick-ass heroine and tight-knit friendships, that really gets to her. She knows that Cameron is just as enthralled, and Donna has never thought she’d see Cameron deeply engaged in a show that isn’t set in the world of Star Trek.

“I hate Riley,” Cameron says one Tuesday night during a commercial break. They’re watching an episode called “The Initiative,” and Riley has far more screen time than either one of them thinks is strictly necessary.

“Everyone hates Riley,” Donna answers, helping herself to more Pad Thai. “It’s just the way it is.”

They’re quiet when the show comes back, watching as Riley asks Willow for her help in courting Buffy. When Buffy and Willow go to a party in Riley’s frat house and Willow gives Riley some last-minute coaching, Cameron gets a peculiar look on her face.

 

 

“What?” Donna wonders what Cam is thinking about right now.

“Nothing,” says Cameron, still staring at the screen. “I just think it’s weird to threaten to beat someone to death with a shovel.” Cam is a little pale, almost as though she can’t believe what she just heard.

Donna shrugs; that’s hardly the strangest or most violent line of dialogue she’s ever heard on a show about killing demons. But, seeing that a scene between Xander and Harmony is coming, she soon forgets about Cameron’s puzzling reaction as she’s drawn into the drama once again.

 

_March 2000_

As soon as Cameron hears Joe’s voice on the phone, she can tell that this one isn’t just a casual how-are-you-doing telephone call.

“So . . . I have some news.” Joe isn’t doing a good job of sounding offhand, not that he appears to be trying very hard.

“Yeah? Good or bad?” Cam knows that it’s definitely good news, but she’s obligingly playing along with her part of the script.

“Good. Really good, actually.” Joe pauses, and then continues a little tentatively. “Brian and I . . . we’re adopting a baby girl. She’s six days old, and we’ll be getting her this weekend.”

Cameron is stunned for an instant, and then realizes, to her relief, that what she feels about this revelation is uncomplicated joy for Joe. She knows how much this must mean to him. “Joe, that’s . . . that’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you both. Really, I am. Where is she coming from?”

Cam can feel Joe relaxing as he senses her reaction. “Brooklyn. She was abandoned by her mother, left on the doorstep of a church. I can’t believe that the adoption people picked us—I mean, we’re a middle-aged same-sex couple, and that’s not something that usually scores points. I never thought . . . I just can’t believe this is really going to be happening.” Joe sounds a little choked up, and Cam finds tears coming to her eyes as well. She’s never heard Joe this happy, ever.

“So what are you going to call her?” Cam thinks to herself that naming a baby might be one of the few fun things about actually _having_ a baby.

Joe hesitates. “We’re thinking about Courtney. Brian’s mother’s name is Constance, so that’s the C-O part, and the name Courtney is loosely related to the name Gordon, so . . .” Joes sounds a little embarrassed.

“Joe, that’s beautiful. You’re going to be great at this.” Cameron means that sincerely. It’s wonderful to think that life is working out this well for both of them.

“Thanks, Cam. I can’t wait for you to meet her.” Cam feels the flash of warmth from Joe even over the impersonal telephone line, and she hopes she’s reflecting it right back to him.

 

_April 2000_

Donna and Cameron are having dinner with Haley at a Vietnamese restaurant near Stanford’s campus when Donna is suddenly aware that Haley is apparently gearing up to tell them something. “So . . . I didn’t tell you guys this, because I didn’t know whether I’d get in, or if I’d want to go if I _did_ get in, but . . . I just heard from this master’s program at NYU, and they accepted me.” Haley seems to realize that she’s leaving out a lot of information that Donna and Cam would almost certainly want to know, but she pauses to take a sip of her iced tea anyway.

Donna is stunned. New York? NYU? Master’s program? _Haley_? What _was_ this? “You . . . what? When did you . . . what is this program?” A minimum of a hundred questions are floating around in Donna’s head, and these are the only ones that bob to the surface.

“So, it’s a two-year program, and it’s part of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. It’s called the Interactive Telecommunications Program—ITP, they usually shorten it to. It’s all about, well, how people use technology to communicate with each other. It’s kind of a cross between technology and art, and you can study games, video art, web design, all kinds of stuff. It’s an amazing place, and I want . . . I want to go there.” Haley’s eyes are glowing as she describes it all.

Donna hesitates, but then she hears Cameron saying something. “That sounds incredible. I’ve heard about that ITP program—they’re not just churning out coders like a tech school. They’re really teaching people about . . . about new possibilities. I’d have loved to have gone to a place like that.” Donna glances sharply at Cam, wondering if she has regrets about her professional path that she never talks about.

Haley is nodding. “Yeah, exactly. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I graduate, whether I just wanted to start working, or get a graduate degree in comp sci, or what. But when I heard about this, it just seemed, well, perfect.”

Donna is aware that both Haley and Cameron are looking at her, and she realizes that she needs to say something. “I just . . . I’m happy for you, honey, but . . . New York! It’s across the country.” A wave of sadness hits her as she thinks about how far away both of her daughters will be from her next year.

“Mom . . . I’ll come home a lot to visit, Joanie and I both will. She and I have been talking, and we can share an apartment there. It’s not like I won’t have anyone. I mean, you didn’t expect that I’d graduate from college, come work for you at Phoenix, and just never leave, right?” Haley’s look is soft and fond, and Donna starts to feel a little foolish. _No, I didn’t think that, but it didn’t stop me from wanting it anyway._

As if she knows exactly what Donna is thinking, Cameron touches Donna’s hand. “Hey, there’s always a job for you with us, if you ever get tired of doing cool things on the east coast.” Haley smiles, Donna laughs shakily, and then she and Cameron spend the next hour listening to Haley talk about the projects she wants to work on when she gets to NYU next semester.

 

_July 2000_

Donna is happy when she gets an email from Katie that she’s in town for a few days and would like the two of them to have lunch; they haven’t seen each other in awhile. They decide to meet at Chao Yum Thai, the same restaurant that they’d gone to when they first met to discuss the classification categories for MusicLand, where—improbably—they became friends. That all seems so long ago now, Donna muses, so much longer than the almost five years that have actually passed. Time really should be measured in units of emotion rather than in days and weeks and years.

After they order, Katie gives Donna a funny little grin. “So, I have something to tell you. I’m moving back to San Francisco.”

Donna feels a jolt of pleasure at this news; she really enjoys Katie’s company, and (aside from Tanya, sort of, and Diane) she doesn’t really have any friends who aren’t Cameron. “That’s fantastic! When? Why?”

Katie laughs. “I’ve just been hired by a new startup, a sort of online encyclopedia. It’s called Wikipedia, and it’s really cool: users are the ones who write and edit the articles, so it’s completely community based. I’m going to be overseeing the whole categorization schema.”

Donna arches an eyebrow. “Wow. That sounds . . . well, it could be great, but nobody will be doing any fact-checking or editing or anything?” She wonders how this model could possibly avoid being a total mess.

Katie shrugs. “Yeah, it could be chaos, but we’re trusting the users to police each other. There’s also no money-making plan in place: no ads, no subscriptions, no anything. I’m probably crazy for doing this, but I just love the idea of information being controlled by the people who use it, not by some overlord who doles it out for a fee.”

Donna _does_ like the idea, even if her VC shark side is shouting out a thousand reasons why it could never work. “So, they’re going to be based out here?”

Katie shakes her head. “No, in Florida, but they meet all the time with investors in Silicon Valley, so they thought it would be better for me to be here than there. And frankly, I love the idea of moving back. Seattle was great, but San Francisco feels more like home, you know?”

Donna is happy to hear that, glad that Katie has gotten over Gordon’s death enough to want to come back to them. She’s part of their orbit, and both of them know it. “I’m so glad you’re doing this. When will you be making the move?”

“By September, I think. Do you have any leads on great apartments?” Donna doesn’t, but she thinks Tanya might, and the rest of the lunch flies by as they talk and laugh together.

 

_January 2001_

**Press Release**

_MACWORLD EXPO, SAN FRANCISCO—January 9, 2001—Apple® today introduced iTunes, the world’s best and easiest to use “jukebox” software that lets users create and manage their own music library on their Mac®. iTunes lets Mac users import songs from their favorite CDs; compress them into the popular MP3 format and store them on their computer’s hard drive; organize their music using powerful searching, browsing and play list features; watch stunning visualizations on their computer screen; and burn their own audio CDs — all in one easy-to-use application. Exclusively for Mac users, iTunes is available as a free download from www.apple.com._

_“Apple has done what Apple does best — make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had some fun with history in this time jump chapter--those are actual screenshots from the original home pages of fanfiction.net (look how few fics they had to start out with!) and Google, and that's the real press release that Apple issued for iTunes. I hope there's at least one person out there who finds the elaborate Buffy shovel joke running through this fic amusing. If not, there are worse ways of passing time than amusing myself!


	38. Chapter 38

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein a challenge is acknowledged.

Donna is not certain of many things, but she’s certain of this: her bond with Cameron has only grown stronger with the passage of time. Although there are still bumps and arguments—this, after all, is life and not a Disney movie—neither of them doubts the fundamental truth that, whatever might be happening in their world, they are a unit in the face of both joy and adversity, happy in a way that neither has really known before, comfortable with themselves and the world that they have built together. Cleaning up after dinner one evening, Donna is contentedly allowing these thoughts to trickle through her mind while Cameron is on the couch reading _The Mercury News_ , huddled under the Hudson Bay blanket that she particularly likes on winter nights. All at once, Cam breaks into Donna’s reflective state with some sort of odd-sounding noise deep in her throat. Donna glances over from the kitchen, squinting to see the article she’s reading. “What?”

Cam snorts in response.“Did you read this Apple press release?” Not waiting for an answer, Cam starts reading it out loud to Donna. _“ ‘iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.’_ Can you fuckingbelieve that? Miles ahead, my ass. MusicLand _created_ the digital musical revolution. Jobs is acting like we don’t exist.” Cameron is practically shaking with rage.

Donna shrugs, trying not to over-react. “We knew iTunes was coming; there’s been buzz about it for at leastsix months. We’ll deal with it.”

“Yeah, sure we will—we’re way ahead of them. But this press release just pisses me off.” Cam slams down the paper for extra emphasis. Donna has to laugh, even as her gut clenches a little, because she’s also certain of this: nothing can ever be perfect except in the most fleeting of instances. 

The universe always has a stubborn tendency to harmonize; now that Donna and Cameron’s relationship no longer feels tentative and precarious, now that they are inescapably, absolutely, truly together, Donna knows (even though she doesn’t want to say it aloud) that unless something changes dramatically, MusicLand will inevitably begin to lose ground in the online music market. ITunes is an elephant that they might be able to ignore for awhile, but not forever.

 

**§§§**

Admirably, Donna and Cameron succeed in evading the question of iTunes until early March, when Tanya finally brings its looming threat to the forefront. “We need to come up with a strategy, or we’re going to start losing our iTunes users.”

Donna feels her heart sink a little; she, who has always been pragmatic and unsentimental to a fault when it comes to business decisions, has allowed herself to minimize what the release of iTunes might mean for MusicLand, and she’s suddenly furious with herself. “You’re right. Let’s meet and talk about it later this week.” It isn’t necessarily the beginning of the end, Donna thinks. There are plenty of things that they can do to ensure that Musicland will remain a dominant player in the space for years to come. They’ll come up with a plan; they always do.

In the end, since they have a lot of ground to cover in order to make decisions about the future of the company, Donna, Cameron, and Tanya decide to devote a full day to planning MusicLand’s 2001 business strategy. The meeting starts at 9:00 at Donna and Cameron’s house, which is both more comfortable and quieter than the buzzing chaos of the (once Mutiny, once Comet, now Phoenix) office space.

Tanya, ever organized, has a folder full of background facts to relay to them. “First of all, I think it’s pretty clear that iTunes is Apple’s response to Napster. They don’t like the piracy of MP3 files, so they’re attacking it on two fronts: they’re trying to get Napster shut down, and they’re also setting up a legal alternative for Napster users.”

Cameron interrupts, looking annoyed. “We’ve been offering a legal alternative to Napster before there even _was_ a Napster.” Donna can tell how personally Cam is taking all this, how much of herself is invested in MusicLand.

Tanya nods. “Sure we have, and I don’t think the popularity of Napster damaged our existing user base too much; our subscribers were already used to paying for online music. It might have hurt our growth over the last year or so, but we’ve been holding our own. Napster really isn’t an issue anymore—the court order to shut it down should be coming in the next six months. ITunes is different; it’s a direct competitor, and it’s one that might end up crushing everything in its path.”

Donna, glancing at Cameron’s stricken expression, absorbs what Tanya has just said. “We’ve been on the scene for the past four years. Our first mover advantage has to count for something.” MusicLand is good, dammit. Donna herself still isn’t over that “miles ahead of every other jukebox application” statement in the iTunes press release that had so infuriated Cameron. It had infuriated her as well, even if she didn’t express that rage as emphatically as Cameron had.

Cam is nodding. “Yeah, and don’t forget: iTunes is currently only available for Mac users, and Macs are a really small segment of the home computer market. ITunes might end up being a whole lot of nothing.” Cameron doesn’t look as though she entirely believes what she has just said, and Donna can’t really take comfort in it either, much as she would like to. Steve Jobs is brilliant, and anything that Apple does has to be taken very, very seriously.

Tanya sighs. “Look, I wish I could just brush this off, but I know in my gut that iTunes is a game-changer. I think it’ll only be a year or two before it’s available for Windows, and that’s going to make the market explode for them. I’m sure they’ll have their own portable MP3 player before that. And who knows—they might move away from the MP3 file format to something else, just to make all of those Napster pirated MP3s that much less valuable. We can’t brush off how much of a threat they’re going to be to us.”

Donna knows that what Tanya is saying makes sense. “That means that we have a year, or at most two years, to solidify MusicLand, to keep whatever advantage we’ve forged for ourselves by getting here first.”

“We need to expand,” Cam says suddenly. “We need to make MusicLand even bigger, more exciting, than iTunes ever thought of being. What about video? We could let users watch and talk about movies online.”

Donna shakes her head; investing in the possibility of online video would be a huge risk. “I don’t know, Cam. Some really early adopters are starting to use broadband instead of telephone modems, but we don’t have any good way of predicting how much, or how fast, that’s going to catch on. It might be another ten years before it really goes mainstream.”

Cam is looking at her with a flicker of obvious disappointment. “It’s a risk, sure. But it could pay off big, if it goes our way. I doubt Apple has video on its radar right now, because they’re still setting up the sort of MP3 jukebox that we’ve had for years.”

Donna hesitates. “We could go smaller instead of bigger, maybe focus on the community aspect of MusicLand, since that’s the one piece that already differentiates us from iTunes. If we beef that up, we wouldn’t need to host as much actual content, whether it’s music or video.”

Cam’s eyes flash, and Donna knows how much she hates the idea before she says anything out loud. “I really don’t think that’s the way to go. If we’re not aggressive enough, we’re going to lose whatever advantage we have really quickly. We can’t roll over before we even start this fight, and we don’t want to turn MusicLand into a dime-a-dozen bulletin board.”

“I’m not talking about rolling over, but we need to be realistic. If we gamble on a really aggressive strategy like online video and lose, that’s the end of MusicLand. If we play this a little more conservatively, we can at least keep the whole thing going for awhile longer.” Donna looks at Cameron a little pleadingly, willing her to understand. Cam shrugs and looks away.

Tanya decides to jump in at that moment. “Let’s just keep a running list of ideas, and we can circle back to them later.” Despite everything, Donna can’t help smiling a little to herself, finding it amusing that Tanya appears to have picked up Trip’s signature phrase of “circle back.”

As they continue the discussion, Donna tries not to be obvious as she eyes Cameron and wonders how all of this is going to shake down.

 

**§§§**

Donna and Cameron spend much of the rest of the month arguing over the future of MusicLand. Cam is stubbornly sticking to her video vision, and sometimes Donna thinks that she might be right. Still, she knows that there’s a much better chance of a strategy like that failing rather than working, and she just isn’t ready to gamble like that with the fate of their company. Cameron, on the other hand, never seems to have any doubt that they’ll succeed, however long the odds might seem.

Donna knows that both of them are trying hard to keep the arguments about work from bleeding into their home life, but that’s not always realistic or possible. Despite their best efforts, tension between them grows. This, Donna realizes, is the inescapable down side of working professionally with your life partner. When things are going well, nothing is better. When they aren’t, there’s no respite or escape. There’s no doubt that Cameron is just as miserable about the situation as Donna is, but so far, neither of them has been able to find their way out of it.

One night, after a particularly tiring, frustrating day at the office, Cameron flops on the couch next to Donna without saying anything. Donna looks at her, suddenly overcome with the exhaustion of the past few weeks. Cam catches her eye and smiles a little wistfully. “Hey, can I ask your advice about something?”

“Go for it.” Donna takes Cameron’s hand, glad to feel the warmth of her, even if it might only be a temporary break from their ongoing problems.

“So, I’m having a thing at work. My partner just doesn’t seem to get what I’m trying to tell her. I mean, I’ve tried a whole bunch of different ways, but nothing’s getting it done.” Cam lets out a slow breath, and Donna smiles at her.

“That’s weird. I’m having a similar problem at work myself.” Cameron puts her head on Donna’s shoulder, and they both sit silently for a moment.

“I hate it when we fight,” Cam says finally.

“We’re not exactly fighting, we’re just . . . disagreeing passionately about one of the most important things in our lives. It’s different. And anyway, we always knew that, sooner or later, the company would have a major challenge, and we’d have different ideas about what to do. It’s just who we are.” Donna is relieved to be talking about this with Cameron; it’s a whole lot better than just pretending that nothing at all is the matter.

“Do you know what went wrong with Mutiny?” Cam still has her head on Donna’s shoulder, and Donna stiffens a little at the mention of what remains, even now, one of the largest single regrets of her life.

“Aside from . . . everything?” It should come out as a joke, but Donna isn’t feeling very funny right now.

“No, I mean it. The thing that wrecked it was that we didn’t listen to each other, and we both thought that we were a hundred percent right. We weren’t.” Cameron is sitting up now, looking at Donna earnestly.

Donna sighs. “Yeah. We’ve said that before, that maybe if we’d just waited six months and diversified to other platforms before the IPO . . . maybe everything would have been different.”

“Maybe it would have been. I mean, we’ll never know with Mutiny, but Phoenix is our do-over.” Cam’s voice is a little choked, and Donna again marvels at just how much the company means to both of them. They can’t screw it up this time.

“You’re right; it is. And don’t forget our vision statement—we promised to listen to each other and remember what’s important.” Donna thinks about how long, long ago it has been since they drafted that vision statement before Phoenix was born.

“Yeah. You were onto something with that thing after all.” Cam is smiling at her now.

“So ok: compromise, we’ll do it. We’ll listen to each other and compromise. Let’s get it done.” Donna gets up to make a pot of coffee, and she and Cam stay up all night, talking it out. By morning, they have the beginnings of a plan.

 

**§§§**

Donna knows that she and Cameron are probably too exhausted and caffeinated to sound as coherent as she would like them to sound, but nevertheless she wants to run everything by Tanya as soon as she gets into the office the following morning. They all sit down in the main conference room before anything else has a chance to happen.

Donna glances at Cam, who nods at her to start. Tanya looks at both of them expectantly. Waiting a few extra seconds to organize her thoughts, Donna begins. “Cameron and I have been giving the future of MusicLand a lot of thought, and we’ve decided that the best strategy would be to take a multi-pronged approach, using what we feel are the best parts of the strategies that we came up with individually.”

Tanya takes a sip of the juice that’s in front of her. “That sounds smart, as long as the plan doesn’t get in its own way. We need to make sure that we’re moving forward, not running in circles.”

“Exactly,” Cameron interjects. “We think that we have two main features that iTunes doesn’t have: we have a real community built around our online music service, and we have a portable MP3 player on the market that’s been doing really well. We want to push and expand both of those things, really enhance the community user experience, and improve Musicland2Go, so our users really come to rely on our own MP3 player before Apple gets its own to market.”

Tanya is nodding. “I like that. We can talk specifics as soon as possible; we’ll need to get a project plan in place for the enhancements. We can also drop some teasers about what we have in mind on our discussion forums, to get users excited. When we’re a little closer, we can leak some things to the tech press.”

As always, Donna appreciates having someone as sharp and practical as Tanya on their team. “We also decided that we want to increase R&D around the idea of incorporating video into MusicLand eventually. I don’t think that it makes sense to focus on video for the immediate future, but we want to be ready to jump when enough of our user base has broadband, which might happen as soon as the next five years.” Donna sees that Cameron is smiling at her, evidently satisfied with the compromise, and Donna is as well: planning for video in the near future is smart; throwing all of their eggs behind the idea of incorporating video in the next eighteen months, while bold and dazzling as an idea, is also inarguably reckless. _I’m so glad that we were able to find some middle ground this time,_ Donna thinks. _Whatever happens, this one isn’t going to be another Mutiny._

Donna is abruptly aware that Tanya is gathering up her things, indicating that, to her mind at least, the meeting is over. “I’m going to spend the morning working on a draft project plan for the music forums and the MP3 player. I’ll shoot it over to you both when I have something readable down on paper.” She leaves the room, and Donna and Cameron look at each other, relieved that battle plans are underway. Watching Cam’s determined expression, Donna knows that, whatever happens, Phoenix will not go down without the most valiant of fights.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, we all knew that this was bound to happen--no tech company stays on top forever (except Amazon and Apple, so far). But still, I kind of ache for Phoenix right now.


	39. Chapter 39

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein options are weighed.

Although she never manages to relax entirely, Cameron finds herself minimally less anxious about the future of MusicLand with every passing week. Subscriptions are holding their own; in fact, when new options are introduced to the bulletin boards (more robust private messaging; ways to create private discussion forums among friends; better search tools), they even increase a little. With the launch of the 2.0 version of MusicLand2Go slated for early November (smaller, thinner, larger hard drive, available in different colors), both Cameron and Donna are starting to breathe a little easier. They just might, in fact, be able to head off the formidable iTunes challenge and survive to fight another day.

Despite their tentatively growing optimism, the two of them speculate endlessly about potential future iTunes developments, and what those developments might mean for MusicLand. “We don’t want to make all of our decisions based on what we think Apple might have in mind,” Donna says one evening over dinner. “We can’t be completely reactive.”

“Sure, but it _is_ a game of chess, in a way. We need to think a few moves ahead if we’re going to win the war.” Cam is putting a lot of time and mental energy into this chess match, more than she hopes Donna realizes. Whatever happens with the company in the end, she’s not going to fail because of a lack of imagination.

Donna nods. “Yeah, it is, but we don’t want to be caught in a paradigm that isn’t ours. We need to innovate, not just try to keep ahead of market forces.” She pauses, and Cam feels a flash of relief at how on-top-of-things Donna sounds. Between the two of them, they’re handling this. It’s going to be ok.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I kind of imagine that the next thing that Apple will probably do is to set up a store and sell music.” MusicLand has always licensed music for use on its site, and now for use in its MP3 player. Selling music to users the way CDs and LPs have always been sold is a different model, but it’s a direction that seems, to Cam at least, a logical one for Apple.

Donna is giving Cam a sharp look now. “I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right. We need to talk through that possibility; it might mean that we have to change up what we do, to head it off.” Caution about not being reactive, Cam notes, seems to be put on temporary hiatus.

“The thing is, users might like the idea of actually ‘owning’ digital music more than subscribing to a service for a monthly fee. There’s a psychological difference there.” Cameron sometimes gives herself a headache, trying to anticipate what users might want and figuring out how to give it to them.

Donna is frowning in concentration now. “Switching everything to a per-music-track flat fee could end up costing us a lot of revenue, but that loss might be worth it if we keep our users, or even grow the user base. We could always charge a smaller subscription fee for just the discussion boards, but that might end up hurting us in the long run.”

Cam feels suddenly tired; everything that needs to be considered is endlessly exhausting, even if they’re currently staying above water. Work, she is forced to admit to herself, just isn’t as fun as it used to be, back when MusicLand was shiny and new, back when they were the only digital music game in town. “Yeah. Let’s talk about it tomorrow with Tanya.” Right now, all she wants to do is watch the new episode of _Buffy_ that’ll be on in a half hour and forget about the whole thing for a little while. When she hears Donna sigh and nod, Cam knows that she’s not the only one feeling the strain of everything that they’re confronting to stay alive.

 

**§§§**

Fortunately, August brings a welcome distraction in the form of Joanie and Haley, who decide to spend the month in California. Both Donna and Cameron are delighted by this development; now that the girls live in New York, they haven’t been able to see each other in person as much as any of them would like. Despite the continual worries about MusicLand’s future, Donna and Cameron both resolve to take as much time off from work as they can during the month, so they can spend time with Haley and Joanie, hanging out and catching up.

One Saturday afternoon, Donna and Haley decide to go see _Independence Day_ , leaving Cameron and Joanie to relax by the pool for a couple of hours before dinner. They’re both quietly absorbed in their books when Joanie suddenly breaks the silence. “So, I kind of got a job offer today.”

Cameron knows that Joanie is in a somewhat precarious state with her career right now: her internship at the _New York Times_ ended in June, but (at least as far as Donna and Cameron knew), she didn’t have any definite plans for September. This mention of a job offer is big, and Cameron knows how relieved Donna will be when she hears about it. “Yeah? What’s the job?”

“It would be at the _Star-Ledger._ It’s a paper in New Jersey, a pretty good one. They were impressed with the stuff that I did at the _Times_ as an intern.” Joanie hesitates, but then takes a sip of her drink and doesn’t continue.

Cameron smiles; this job sounds good. “That’s great! You’re taking it, right?”

Joanie shrugs, then nods. “I guess so. Yeah. I mean, I’m lucky to get any job at all, and it’s definitely a solid offer.”

Cam studies her. “You don’t seem totally thrilled. What’s wrong?”

Joanie sighs. “I know I’m being an asshole. It’s just . . . it’s in New Jersey, which means I’d have to move out of New York, probably. I love New York, and I love sharing an apartment with Haley there. I’d be writing news stories, and I really want to focus on photojournalism. Also, working at the _Times_ , even as an intern, was just . . . it was awesome. It’s going to be hard to give that up. There was this amazing energy there, and I learned so much from everybody.”

“Does the _Times_ ever hire their interns for regular jobs?” Cameron hates hearing how conflicted Joanie sounds about the _Star-Ledger_ job.

Joanie shrugs again. “Sometimes, but not often. I applied, but I haven’t heard anything back. That’s better than a flat-out no, but it’s not that encouraging. I need to let the _Star-Ledger_ people know by the middle of September.”

“Just take the job. It doesn’t mean you have to stay there forever—you can get experience, and then you’ll be even stronger when you apply for a job somewhere else.” Cam smiles as she hears herself giving practical, grownup advice to Joanie. A lot of Donna has apparently rubbed off on her.

Joanie nods, looking as though she’s feeling a trifle better. “Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Cam. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Cam gives herself a silent thumbs-up, relieved that she seems to have handled this particular step-mother/surrogate big sister challenge adequately.

 

**§§§**

At dinner a few nights later (grilled swordfish and corn on the cob), Haley talks about her upcoming second year at ITP. “So, we have to declare a yearlong project at the beginning of the semester. I’m really getting serious about CGI animation. I think I’m going to create a CGI film as my thing.”

Donna looks at her, eyebrow raised. “CGI animation? I thought you were going to stick with web design.”

“Well, I was, but I just think that CGI is really fun. It was my favorite course last year, and it can just be amazing.” Haley rarely sounds this enthusiastic, Cam thinks to herself. She knows, and Donna does too, just how much the right project can light someone up like that.

Cameron realizes that Donna is speaking again. “Do you think you’d like to be a CGI animator as a career? Or are you just interested in it as your project?” Cam shoots Donna a look, and Donna rolls her eyes at her. Cameron is constantly trying to get Donna to ease up a little on the mom-pressure when the girls are home. Sometimes it works, but usually, like right now, Donna just ignores her and asks whatever she feels like asking.

This time, however, Haley doesn’t seem to mind. “I’m thinking about it. There are lots of jobs for CGI animators nowadays, and people also do it as freelance consultants. Our school has plenty of contacts for jobs like that, so I’d have a leg up on a lot of other people.”

Joanie, who hasn’t said anything yet, takes a bite of her swordfish. “Sorry to sound like an idiot, but what exactly does a CGI animator do?”

Haley looks eager to answer the question. “Lots of things. Well, create animated characters, of course, but also their environments, and all the special effects surrounding everything. It kind of blends artistic creativity with tech skills: you have to be able to conceive the art, but you also have to be good at the video editing and graphics software. I’ve gotten more and more interested in art, and CGI just sort of pulls everything that I like together.”

Cam nods; it does sound perfect for Haley. Actually, it’s very much in line with work that Cam herself has done in developing games.“I love all of that, too. I think it’s great that you’re getting so into it. Do you want to create video games?” Idly, Cam wonders what it would have been like to study all of this formally in a graduate program, rather than learn what she needed to learn on the fly while frantically trying to keep a company alive.

“I think I want to focus on movies, not video games or television. I mean, _Toy Story_ came out in 1995, and it was the first full-length CGI movie ever produced. I think there are going to be more and more of those, and I really want to be part of it.” Haley is excitedly waving her fork in the air, and Cameron can’t help grinning at her. In a way, she’s glad that Haley is choosing a different path from her own, even if their interests have turned out to be so unexpectedly similar.

“That sounds awesome. If they ever make an animated version of _Buffy_ , you can do that.” Haley laughs, and talk shifts to predictions for the upcoming season six, about which all of them have very strong opinions.

 

**§§§**

Donna and Cameron are succeeding so well at prioritizing time with Joanie and Haley over work, in fact, that the acquisition offer from Apple catches them entirely by surprise. It first comes in the form of a suspiciously casual email, addressed to both of them and from Steve Jobs himself:

 _Subject: Possible Venture_  
_Date: Tues, 21 August 2001 13:14:21 -0500_  
_From: steve@apple.com  
_ _To: d.emerson@phoenix.com; c.howe@phoenix.com_

_  
Hello, Donna and Cameron:_

_We at Apple greatly admire how the two of you have developed and grown MusicLand into a substantial player in the online music market. Rather than compete with each other, we feel that it might be in the best interests of both of our companies to merge into an unbeatable force. If you have any interest in considering an acquisition offer from Apple, let’s get together as soon as we can to discuss some possibilities._

_Looking forward to hearing from you!_

Cameron bursts into Donna’s office as soon as she reads the email, and she finds Donna staring at her own screen. She looks up to meet Cam’s eyes. “Yeah. I just saw it, too.”

“What do you think?” In point of fact, Cameron doesn’t know what she herself thinks; the last thing that she had ever expected was an offer from Apple, although now that it’s here, she has to admit that it makes perfect sense from Apple’s point of view. Whether it would make sense from Phoenix’s, however, is an open question.

Donna hesitates, looking troubled. “I don’t know. It probably can’t hurt to set up a few meetings and see what they have in mind. They might be offering so little that it’ll be easy to walk away. Or they might want to take MusicLand in a direction that we don’t want it to go. But maybe . . .”

Cam finishes her thought. “Maybe it would actually be something that would make everything better. Yeah, let’s hear them out. You’re right; it can’t hurt.” She and Donna look at each other, and Cameron wonders if Donna is as terrified as she is. Change, in Cameron’s experience, has a lot better chance of being bad than being good. Still, not getting specifics about the offer would be foolish; they’re running a business, after all, and if they don’t like what they hear, they can certainly reject the whole thing.

 

**§§§**

When Cameron answers the phone that night, she’s surprised to hear Joe on the other end of the line. They’ve developed a habit of calling each other at least once a week to chat about their lives, but she had just talked to him a few days ago. “Hey. Anything wrong?”

“No, nothing at all. I just wanted to tell you that Courtney saw a picture that I have of you in my office, the one where you’re standing in front of the Airstream. She pointed at you and said ‘Cameron.’" Joe sounds incredibly proud, and Cam finds herself unexpectedly touched by that. She’s never seen Joe happier than he is when he’s with Courtney.

“I can’t believe she could recognize me there. I mean, I’ve only seen her a few times. Pretty smart kid!” The last time Cameron had seen Courtney was about ten months ago, when she and Donna had traveled to New York to visit Joanie and Haley, and they had spent some time with Joe and Brian. Courtney had been barely talking then, but Cam guesses she must have noticed more stuff than might have been expected. Babies, she thinks, actually turn out to be kind of interesting sometimes.

“Yeah, she really is. We’re amazed at all the things that she notices and says.” Joe talks more about Courtney, and Cam just listens to the sound of his voice, enjoying a brief respite from the stress of the Apple offer as it washes over her.

Joe pauses, apparently realizing that the conversation so far has been a little one-sided. “Hey, are you ok? Anything on your mind?”

Cameron hesitates, wondering if telling Joe about Apple before she and Donna know more about their offer is a good idea. “Sort of, yeah.”

Joe waits, and then prompts her gently. “If you want to talk about it, I’m right here.”

Cam feels the powerful force of Joe’s full attention on her now, a force that she’s rarely been able to resist. “Well, we kind of got an acquisition offer from Apple today. I mean, it was just an email, so we don’t know any real details, but . . . yeah, it happened.”

Joe hesitates, obviously weighing his next words carefully before releasing them. “Do you want advice? Or do you just want me to listen?”

Cam smiles a little to herself. No matter how Zen and centered Joe has become over the years, she can’t imagine him _not_ giving advice. “Any advice would be gratefully received.”

“There are two things you’ll need to consider. First, what’s the best business move for Phoenix? And second, what would make you happiest? They might not have the same answer, and you’ll need to figure out what’s most important to you.” Joe has that solemn voice that he uses when he thinks he’s delivering words of wisdom, but Cameron can’t find it in herself to make fun of him, even in her head: Joe, she recognizes, is casting the crux of the decision ahead in very clear terms.

“Yeah, that’s about right. I just hope we’ll be able to figure out the answers when we hear what Apple has to say.” Privately, Cam thinks that what would make her happiest would be to have the relationship she has now with Donna and the excitement of the first couple of years of MusicLand all at the same time. But that, of course, is impossible.

 

**§§§**

The next week is a whirlwind of meetings with Apple to discuss possible scenarios and potential offers. Cameron has to admit that she likes the Apple people, who all seem creative and dedicated to their work, and who also seem genuinely appreciative of what MusicLand has to offer. In the end, Donna and Cameron decide to go to the Airstream for the weekend to discuss everything that has been put in front of them. As has been their habit on Airstream weekend nights for years, they build a campfire, pour some wine, and settle down to talk.

Donna shuffles through a stack of papers in front of her. “So, let’s just summarize what Apple is offering us. Basically, we have three choices. We can reject the offer and try our luck at competing with them. We can sell MusicLand outright and just walk away. Or we can sell MusicLand to them with the contingency that we’ll continue to be involved in its development and integration into iTunes.”

Cameron looks at her. “So, that third thing . . . what exactly would that mean?”

“It means, basically, that we’d work for Apple. We’d be pretty high up on the food chain there—they’ve offered us each vice president titles—but we’d be working for someone else.” Donna looks just about as conflicted as Cameron feels at the idea.

“But we wouldn’t have to give up MusicLand. We’d have a say in how they use what we’ve built.” Cameron thinks about how much she loves MusicLand, and how invested she is in its future, especially integrating video into its delivery platform. She likes what she’s seen of Apple, but still, the idea of giving up on Phoenix, the second-chance company that has changed her life so much, seems unthinkable.

Donna is looking at Cameron in that particular _Donna_ way, the look that always seems to peer inside of her soul without any effort at all. “I love MusicLand too. Maybe we should just say no to the whole thing and take our chances.”

Cam sighs. “The money part of it is good, right?”

Donna nods. “It’s very good. We’d get substantially more if we sold to them outright, but the package is really good for the sale with contingencies too. It’s a combination of cash and stock options, and if Apple does at all well, we wouldn’t have to think about money for the rest of our lives. But we’ve been doing well enough that money doesn’t really need to be a factor in our decision, not really.”

Cameron tries to absorb that idea: if Donna says that the money part doesn’t really matter, then it _really_ doesn’t matter. “Our chances probably aren’t that great if we go it alone, right?” Cam thinks about just how stressful work has been since the release of iTunes. Much as she loves MusicLand, she doesn’t relish the thought of daily struggles with that stress in the face of an uncertain outcome.

Donna hesitates for an instant before answering. “Probably not, in the long term. I think we’ll continue to lose ground, and ultimately, well, I don’t think we can win against a company like Apple.”

Cameron nods. “So it sounds like we should sell, and our choice is sticking with Phoenix and creating a new product, or going with MusicLand and working for Apple.”

“That’s the way I see it, too. I think we probably need to sell, but the question is how we want to do that.” Donna isn’t looking at her as she says this, and Cameron feels a pang of loss at what seems to be happening.

“Going to work for Apple would be safer, right? We’d have a product to work on that we both care about, and they do seem pretty great.” It doesn’t feel entirely right to Cameron, even as she says it, but it doesn’t feel totally wrong either.

Donna is smiling at her, fondly, sadly. “Since when have you ever wanted to take the safe route?”

Cameron shrugs. “Probably since I found other things in my life to make me happy besides work.”

Donna takes Cam’s hand. “If we go work for Apple, it doesn’t necessarily have to be forever. If we come up with some idea, we can always start up Phoenix again. I mean, that’s the point of a Phoenix, right? It can come back to life at any time.”

Cameron squeezes Donna’s hand, trying to quell the intense feeling of loss washing through her right now. “Yeah, we can do that. And we always knew that Phoenix wouldn’t last forever. Nothing does.”

“Well, almost nothing does. We will.” Donna says it confidently, and Cameron’s throat suddenly constricts so much that speech is impossible. She runs her fingers across Donna’s hand in response, and Donna kisses her on the forehead.

After awhile, Donna clears her throat. “We don’t have to give Apple an answer until mid-December; they’re giving us lots of time to make up our minds. Let’s just sit on this for awhile and kick it around for a couple of months. We have to be really sure before we move forward.

Cameron nods, relieved that they don’t have to decide definitively tonight. “Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s do that.” After that they sit quietly, watching the embers of the fire that they built glow a dull red before slowly beginning to fade into darkness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel absurdly sad right now!


	40. Chapter 40

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein the world implodes.

**5:30 AM**

It’s still dark outside when Donna opens her eyes that morning. She’s been waking up early lately; wrestling with the decision about the Apple offer occupies much of her head space, and extra hours seem to be needed to accommodate it. Cameron, on the other hand, appears dead to the world, and Donna thinks longingly for a moment of trying to doze for a couple of hours more herself. When she realizes that sleep isn’t a realistic possibility right now, Donna decides to slip quietly out of bed, make some coffee, and go through her stack of spreadsheets and notes once again, trying to achieve some measure of clarity.

Waiting impatiently for the coffee light to turn red, Donna reflects on how quiet the house has been since Haley and Joanie flew back to New York last weekend. She misses them, but she’s grateful for the month that they had together. Haley’s semester will start tomorrow, and Joanie will be formally accepting the _Star-Ledger_ job offer by the end of the week. Both of her daughters, Donna muses, seem to be well on their way to having happy, fulfilled lives as adults. There’s nothing more that she ever wanted for them than that.

Turning on the little kitchen TV set, Donna tries to decide if she’s hungry enough this early for anything other than coffee. She half-listens to the news as she thinks about toasting an English muffin.

_It’s 5:45 AM in Los Angeles and 8:45 AM here in New York, live from the CNN Financial News headquarters._

_It is beautiful outside, a perfect September day with lots of sunshine._

Donna is pouring her coffee when the urgency of the CNN Breaking News music catches her attention.

_It’s 8:52 here in New York. We understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. You’re looking at the World Trade Center, and we understand that a plane has crashed into the south tower. We don’t know anything more than that. We don’t know if it was a commercial aircraft._

_I’m afraid we have a tragedy on our hands._

Donna blinks, staring at the unthinkable image of black smoke coming from one of the World Trade Center towers. Breakfast forgotten for the moment, she turns up the sound of the television and waits for some rational explanation, thoughts of Joanie and Haley in New York beginning to creep into her consciousness even as she tries to push them away.

 

**6:00 AM**

Donna listens to the news reports, switching channels quickly to learn more. Suddenly, almost unable to process the sight, she watches as another plane hits the other World Trade Center tower.

_Oh, my God, it looks like a second plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center. I think we have a terrorist act._

_There are explosions—people are running up the streets, everyone is panicking._

_And now you have to move from talk about a possible accident to talk about something deliberate._

Trembling, Donna half-runs toward the bedroom and shakes Cameron’s shoulder, more roughly than she means to. “Cameron?”

Cam rolls over and looks at her blearily. “Donna? What time is it?”

Donna wonders vaguely at the oddness of the question. What does that matter right now? “I don’t know. Cam, something’s happening.”

Cam is fully awake now and looking fearful at Donna’s expression. “What’s wrong?”

It takes a moment for Donna to marshal enough breath to form words for a coherent answer. “The World Trade Center . . . two planes have crashed into it, and it looks like it was on purpose. I think . . . it’s bad. And the girls might be . . . anywhere. I don’t know.” She stops talking, not wanting to let her mind move from the general horrors of potential acts of terrorism to the very personal, very specific horrors of her daughters alone in New York City right now. She tries to remember where NYU is in relation to lower Manhattan, tries to recall what Joanie might be doing this morning. Her brain, however, seems frozen.

Cameron is scrambling out of bed, throwing on a pair of jeans as she does so. She moves quickly into the living rooms, grabs the remote control lying on the coffee table, and clicks on the big television set. The two of them settle onto the couch together, tense and upright, listening as more news reports fill the screen.

_I think we have a terrorist act of proportions we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture._

_President Bush has been informed of this tragedy happening in New York._

_There is chaos in New York at the moment, there is confusion in Washington, the FBI is already investigating reports that a plane was actually hijacked._

Cameron lets out a breath. “Jesus.” She doesn’t say anything else, and Donna doesn’t either.

_We have no idea what the evacuation procedure is in the building. When the impact hit the first tower, you would hope that the people in the second tower were beginning to evacuate._

_At this time, all elevators are out in both towers, according to the rescue workers on the scene. People will have a long, horrendous, terrifying walk down in the darkened building._

 

**6:30 AM**

Donna can’t seem to stop shaking, and Cameron puts an arm around her. “Do you want to try calling Joanie and Haley?”

Donna nods. “Yeah . . . yes. That’s a good idea.” She fumbles around looking for the phone, and Cameron spies it on a shelf on the living room bookcase. She hands it to Donna, who pushes the speed dial number for the girls’ apartment.

Donna shakes her head in frustration. “There’s just a recording of how the lines are full and to try again later. Dammit.”

“Well, that makes sense—everyone must be calling everyone right now. Try Joanie’s cell phone.” Joanie had just gotten a cell phone a few months ago, and Haley doesn’t have one yet.

Donna tries. “Same thing.” She tries to stop her heart from racing, tries to keep her mind as blank as possible, to halt any disaster scenarios involving her daughters from forming there.

_We have a report of six people dead and a thousand injured, but those numbers are certainly going to go up._

_Bridges and tunnels coming into New York have been closed._

Cameron is biting her lip. “Just try again in a couple of minutes. I’m sure they’re both in the apartment—it’s pretty early, even there.” She’s pale, however, and Donna nods without saying anything. Of course that’s where they both should be, but she’s not going to be able to relax until she knows it for sure.

_I don’t want to alarm anyone, but apparently there was an explosion of some kind here at the Pentagon._

_We now have fire confirmed at the Pentagon._

_The heart of the military command center of America—it can’t get much worse than this._

Cameron is breathing raggedly, and Donna takes her hand automatically, eyes locked on the screen in front of them. “Try calling the apartment again.” Cam’s voice is hoarse.

Donna dials again, and this time it rings. Haley picks up almost immediately. “Hello?” Donna’s chest floods with relief at the sound of her voice.

“Haley? Are you . . .” Donna can’t finish the sentence, and suddenly Haley is crying on the phone.

“Mom? I can see the smoke from my window. It’s . . .” Haley chokes mid-sentence.

“I know. I can’t imagine what it would be like, seeing it like that. It’s bad enough on TV. Is Joanie with you?” Donna just needs confirmation that both of her daughters are relatively safe in their apartment; all she wants in life right now, in fact, is to know that.

Haley is crying harder, and Donna is having trouble making out what she’s saying. When she does, her heart lurches. “Joanie . . . Joanie had a breakfast meeting this morning with someone from the _Times_ ; she’s trying to see if there’s any chance of them hiring her, before she takes the New Jersey job. I think . . . I think it’s in a coffee shop near the World Trade Center.” Donna has never heard Haley sounding quite this terrified, and the responsibility of comforting her daughter gives her the ability to push aside her own blind panic for the moment.

“I’m sure she’s fine _—_ she wasn’t actually in the Towers, and that’s the important thing. I’m sure she’s on her way back to you right now.” Donna hopes like hell that what she’s saying is true.

“Right.” Donna hears Haley swallowing hard. “I’m sure that’s right.”

“Listen, I’ll keep trying her cell, and you just stay where you are. Promise? Promise me you won’t go out and try to look for her.” Donna needs to make absolutely certain that Haley is safe, so she can focus the entirety of her terror on Joanie.

“I promise. I’ll . . . I’ll try to call Joanie too. I’ve been trying, but the lines have been down, or something.” Haley sounds a little calmer, and Donna is glad that she seems to have managed to pull off some semblance of “strong maternal figure” right now.

“Good. If you hear anything from her, call me right away. I’ll do the same thing.” They hang up, and Donna looks at Cameron, who is staring at her.

“Joanie . . . Joanie had some sort of morning meeting, and Haley thinks it was in a coffee shop near the World Trade Center.” She doesn’t go on, and she feels Cameron holding her.

“She’s fine. I’m sure she’s fine.” Cam sounds just about as scared as Donna feels right now.

“Yeah. Of course she is. I just . . . I just really want to talk to her.” Donna’s voice is shaking, and Cam’s arms tighten around her.

_We are a nation under siege._

_Whatever is happening, we have no way of knowing whether it’s played out yet, or if it’s just going on._

 

**7:00 AM**

Donna tries Joanie’s cell again. It goes to voice mail after several rings, which makes Donna’s heart pound. Why isn’t Joanie picking up? Donna looks over at Cam. “Voice mail.” She tries to sound matter-of-fact, but Cam looks even paler now.

“The phones are probably all going nuts now; even if it’s ringing, she might not be hearing it.” Donna thinks that Cam's theory sounds unlikely and desperate, but she grabs at it nonetheless.

“Yeah. That makes sense. I’ll try again in a couple of minutes.” Time has ceased having any real meaning at all, so Donna hopes that she’ll actually know when a couple of minutes have passed.

_The Federal Aviation Association has shut down all air traffic nationwide. The country has been immobilized by these terrorist attacks today._

_All Federal office buildings in Washington have been evacuated._

Suddenly, Donna hears raw screams coming from people on the CNN news report, which has switched from Washington back to New York.

_The whole side—no, the whole building has just collapsed. It folded down on itself. You can see a plume of smoke around what was the second tower of the World Trade Center._

_There is panic on the streets right now. We’re talking about massive casualties._

“People . . . people are jumping out the windows. You can see them.” Cameron is crying now, and Donna squeezes her hand and tries to stop her own tears from escaping. This is a horror beyond anything that she has ever witnessed before.

_Oh, God, there it goes! The North Tower is collapsing now._

_One has to assume that thousands of lives have been extinguished._

The phone rings, and Donna leaps to answer it. “Hello?” Please be Joanie, please be Joanie.

“Donna?” It’s Joe’s voice, and Donna feels like crying.

“Joe?” She sees Cameron looking at her, eyes reflecting her own fear and disappointment that it isn’t Joanie on the other end of the line.

“You . . . I know it’s early there, but . . . do you know what’s happening right now?” Joe’s voice is halting, uncharacteristically tripping over his words.

“We know. I was up early today, so I saw it from the first news reports. Are you . . . is everyone there ok?” Donna thinks that all of her words right now sound thick and stupid to her ears.

“Yeah. Well, I’m not sure. Brian’s brother . . . Brian’s brother Steve works in the South Tower. We haven’t been able to get in touch with him yet, so . . .” Joe’s voice is shaking.

“Oh, God, Joe. I’m . . . can you let us know as soon as you hear anything?” Donna feels helpless, more helpless than she’s ever felt before in her life.

“I will. I just wanted to know if you’ve heard from the girls. I tried calling, but I couldn’t get through.” Donna is struck by the full force of Joe’s obvious love for her daughters. At a time like this, when the world is falling apart, one of his first thoughts is for their safety.

“Haley is in the apartment, but Joanie . . . Joanie went out this morning for a breakfast meeting, and Haley thinks it was in a place near the Towers. Haley is far enough away that I think she’s safe and fine, but. . .” Every time Donna repeats this to someone else, the fear inside of her quadruples.

Joe is silent for a moment. “I’m sure she’s ok. It’s chaos out there right now, but that’s a communication problem more than anything else. She’s fine.” He’s obviously trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to convince Donna.

“I’m going to try calling her now again. I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything. Do you want to talk to Cameron?” Joe does, and Donna hands the telephone to Cam and goes into the kitchen with her own cell phone to try Joanie once again. This time it goes straight to voice mail without ringing. Is that better or worse than before? Donna doesn’t know; she also doesn’t know what level of terror is appropriate right now, and she’s not sure she wants to know. Justifiable terror, after all, is a whole lot worse than crazy-exaggerated terror.

_We have a report that a plane is down in Pennsylvania._

_This is United Airlines 93, a Boeing 757 bound from Newark, New Jersey to San Francisco, departing at 8:00 AM. It crashed near the town of Shanksville, south of Pittsburgh._

_This certainly the worst and most coordinated attack in the history of the United States._

Donna isn’t aware of the gasp escaping from her lips. “That plane—United, Newark to SFO, 8:00 takeoff—that’s the one that Haley and Joanie took when they flew here in August.” Now her whole body is shaking.

Cameron looks at her, shocked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I remember it. That means that if all this had happened a month ago, they might have . . .” Donna can’t continue the thought.

“But it didn’t. It’s happening now, and they weren’t on that plane.” Cameron’s words are true, of course, but Donna can’t shake the feeling of a near brush with tragedy.

“I know. But everything is just so random and crazy. Why September 11? Why not August 5?” Donna can’t bear the thought of how many parents have lost children today, how many spouses have lost their partners.

Cameron rubs her eyes and doesn’t answer, possibly because there is nothing meaningful that can be said right now.

 

**8:00 AM**

The phone rings again, and when Donna pounces on it, she almost staggers with relief when she hears Joanie on the other end. There’s so much noise behind her that Donna can hardly make out what her daughter is saying.

“Mom? Haley told me to call you. I’m fine.” Donna thinks that Joanie’s voice sounds more high on adrenalin than frightened, but she can’t really be sure of anything right now.

“Where are you?” Donna hears screams in the background, as well as the steady wail of sirens.

“I’m . . . I’m pretty close to the Towers, about a block or so away. I was having coffee across the street from the World Trade Center, waiting for someone to meet me, when I saw the first plane crash. I just . . . I ran toward it, with my camera. I knew I had to get some pictures. I got some really amazing ones, if they come out.” Joanie is excitedly tripping over her words to tell her this, and Donna can’t believe what she’s hearing.

“You did what? You ran _where_? Goddammit, Joanie! Do you have any sense at all? Do you have any idea what’s happening right now, how dangerous that was?” Donna is shaking so hard that she thinks that she might vomit at any moment.

“Mom, look, this is history. I was here, and I had a camera. I had to document what was happening. That’s what being a photojournalist is. We have to show people the truth.” Hearing her daughter trying to soothe her, as if she were some sort of irrational, doddering fossil needing to be patted and then disposed of, makes Donna even more livid.

“You’re not a photojournalist, you’re just a kid who doesn’t even really have a job right now. I _bought_ you that camera! Do you think it’s your fucking responsibility to take pictures while people are jumping out of collapsing buildings, while bombs are going off all over the country? Just grow up a little, won’t you? I swear to God, I could kill you right now . . .” Donna is barely aware of what she’s saying, and suddenly she feels the phone gently being taken from her hand.

Cam is speaking into the phone now, rubbing the back of Donna’s neck as she’s talking. Donna feels her shaking subsiding just a little at her touch. “Hey, it’s me. You’re ok?”

“I know you are. She was just really scared. It’ll be fine. Listen, can you just get home to Haley now, and call us when you do?” Cameron pauses for a moment. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right, but call us as soon as you get there. Be careful.”

When Cameron hangs up the phone, Donna takes a deep, shuddering breath. “She . . . she went _toward_ this whole thing, not away from it. She wanted to take _pictures_. What the fuck was she thinking?” Donna still can’t get over the fact that, while she was sitting here beside herself with worry, Joanie was busily putting herself into the path of danger intentionally.

Cameron doesn’t answer for a moment. “Donna, she’s twenty-five; people just don’t think that dying is a realistic possibility at that age. She’s also picked a career where risk and danger are kind of the whole point. It’s just . . . I think we’re going to have to get used to it. Joanie was really brave today. You should try to be proud of her.”

Donna looks at Cameron, wondering how she always manages to cut to the heart of things like this. “I wish she’d picked a career where she just locks herself in a basement and works on computers, like we did.”

Cam puts her arm around Donna, holding her. “You mean, like Gordon did? That didn’t turn out to be so safe, either. Nothing ever is.” Donna puts her head on Cam’s shoulder, and they stay like that for several minutes.

 

**9:00 AM**

“I need to call Joe—I should tell him that we’ve heard from Joanie.” Cameron looks at Donna as she says this, and Donna squeezes her hand and nods.

Cameron grabs the phone from the coffee table in front of them and dials without getting up from the couch: she doesn’t seem to want to leave Donna’s side, and Donna doesn’t want her to, either.

Closing her eyes for a second, Donna hears Cameron starting to talk to Joe. “Hey. Yeah, we just heard from Joanie. She’s ok, but she’s still out pretty close to the whole thing. I think she’s going to try to get home now, but she says it might take a long time, because everything is shut down. Hey, let me put you on speaker.”

Joe’s voice, tinny and small inside of the telephone, is clearly audible to both of them now. “It’ll be hard for Joanie to get home from lower Manhattan. You shouldn’t worry if you don’t hear from her for awhile.”

Donna leans over to respond. “Joe . . . have you heard about Brian’s brother yet?” She holds her breath, waiting for his answer.

Joe’s voice is trembling a little as he answers. “We just got a call from him a few minutes ago. He’s ok. He made it out.”

Donna feels a wave of relief wash over her, one totally disproportionate to what should be expected upon hearing news about a person she has never met and probably never will. “I’m so glad.” Donna realizes that “glad” is an absurd word in this situation, and she hopes that Joe understands how much she means by it.

“Thanks. It was . . . he told us that at first they were trying to get everyone in the South Tower to stay in a room in the middle of the building, and not to evacuate. Some people left anyway, and Steve had to make a choice, whether to stay where they were telling them to stay or leave with the people who wanted to get out. He left, and he was on the street before the second plane hit the South Tower. The ones who stayed, well, they all were . . .” Joe’s voice chokes, and he doesn’t finish the sentence.

Donna looks at Cameron, whose face is white. Donna takes her hand before she answers. “Joe, God . . . I don’t know what to say right now.”

Joe laughs, mirthlessly. “Nobody knows what to say, but at least Steve is all right. Brian is really shaken up, of course, but . . . we’re all ok.”

“Joe, can you tell Brian that . . . we love him?” It’s Cameron, who almost never says things like that. Donna feels tears come to her eyes, and she squeezes Cam’s hand hard.

Joe clears his throat, choking a little before he answers. “I will. Thanks, Cam. There’s also . . . a lot of kids in our school have parents who work in the World Trade Center. It’s going to be awhile before we find out if any of them were . . .”

Donna feels a heaviness at his words, at the thought that some of the kids Joe was teaching and helping and guiding might have lost parents today. “Please let us know what happens. We’re . . .” What? Praying for them? What the hell good does that do, right now, in this nightmare?

Joe’s voice is soft. “I know you are. Thank you. I was thinking . . . it might be a good idea if I picked up the girls tomorrow and got them out of the city for a couple of days, if they want to come here. It won’t be easy getting there, but . . . I think they should come. What do you think?”

“If you can convince them to leave, nothing would make me feel better. Thanks, Joe. Really.” A simple “thanks” doesn’t begin to cover the gratitude that Donna is feeling toward Joe right now.

“I’ll convince them. I can be very persuasive.” Joe sounds more like himself than he has all morning, and Donna feels lighter at his words.

“I remember that about you.” They all laugh, letting just a fraction of the misery and terror that they’ve felt all morning drift away.

 

**11:00 AM**

The next time the phone rings, it’s Joanie. Cameron picks up before Donna gets there.“Hey. You’re there? Good. How did it go?” Cam doesn’t say much for what seems like forever, just nodding and murmuring every now and then. Listening to Cam’s half of the conversation, Donna feels her heartbeat slowing to a near-normal, rhythmic throb. Joanie is back home with Haley. They’re both safe. Whatever is happening to other people right now, at least it’s not happening to her daughters.

Cameron glances over at Donna and then speaks into the phone to Joanie. “Do you want to talk to your mom?” Apparently Joanie does, because Cam hands the telephone over to Donna.

Donna and Joanie are both silent for a moment, and then both begin to speak at once. “Joanie . . .”

“Mom . . .”

“No, honey, me first. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Donna feels herself starting to cry again, and she doesn’t try to stop herself this time. “I didn’t mean anything that I said to you. I shouldn’t have yelled. I was just . . .”

“I know.” Joanie actually sounds near tears herself right now. “Mom, it was . . . it was awful. When I was taking the pictures, and even when I was talking to you, I just kind of detached from it all, somehow. Like, I had this job to do, and all I thought about was getting the shots. But after it was all over, when I got through the city and came back home, it all just . . .” She can’t go on, and Donna’s heart breaks for her daughter right now.

“I know. That’s the way it is with work, sometimes; we just get through what we have to do, without letting anything personal in. But I just want you to know just how proud I am of you, right now. I mean that.” Donna sees Cameron smiling at her, and she smiles back, brushing away whatever residual tears remain.

“Thanks.” Joanie’s voice is still shaky, but she sounds more composed now. “That means a lot to me.”

“Just to warn you: I’m probably going to be calling you both constantly for the next couple of days. I’ll try to give you some time off for eating and sleeping.” Donna knows that it’s a lame joke, but she’s pleased when Joanie laughs weakly at it nonetheless.

“I’m ok with that.” They talk a little more before Joanie puts Haley on the line, and for the first time since early morning, Donna feels herself able to take full, deep breaths once again.

 

**5:30 PM**

Late that afternoon, after sitting in front of the television set all day watching the news, Donna and Cameron stay on the couch and listen to President Bush addressing the nation.

_Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts._

_Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve._

_This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world._

Cameron is the first to speak after the speech ends. “I wonder if there _is_ anything good and just left in the world right now.”

Donna is silent, weighing her response. “There is, even if what’s good is . . . us. People doing things, getting by, trying their best. I mean, there’s you, for instance. You were awesome today. I couldn’t have gotten through this without you.”

Cam is looking at her now. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Cam, are you kidding? The way you handled Joanie after I lost it, the way you were there for _me_ . . . You were amazing.” Donna can’t say anything more, knows that it’s impossible for her to express just how much she loves Cameron right now, how unbearable everything would have been without her there to lean on today.

“I knew you didn’t really want to be screaming at Joanie, that’s all. You probably didn’t even know that you _were_ screaming.” Cam is giving her a look that causes Donna to feel the prickle of tears for the approximately millionth time today.

“I don’t think that Joanie will ever be able to understand what it felt like for me today until . . . unless . . . she has kids of her own someday.” Donna is so lost in thought that she doesn’t notice for an instant or two the peculiar expression on Cameron’s face.

“Donna . . . I love them, too. I mean, even though they’re not mine, I love them.” Cam’s voice is oddly earnest.

Donna feels as though someone just punched her in the gut. Why is she screwing up everything she says with the people she loves most, today of all days? “Cameron—of course I know that! I’ve always known that, even when we hadn’t spoken to each other for years. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” She puts her arms around Cam, not wanting to let go right now.

Donna feels Cameron swallowing before responding. “I’m not mad. I just . . . it’s just something I want you to know.”

“Well, I do know. And they love you, too.” Donna’s shirt is becoming wet from Cameron’s tears, and Donna strokes her hair until she knows that Cam has stopped crying. Donna sees now what should always have been obvious: Cameron had been just as terrified as Donna all day.

“At least we’re all ok. I mean, everything could have been so much worse.” Cam’s voice is soft.

Donna sighs. “None of us are ok right now, not really. We’re just more ok than some people are.”

“I’ll take that. That’s good enough for me right now.” Cam curls up into a small, tight ball like a house cat, burying her head in Donna’s lap.

Donna strokes her hair once again. “Yeah. I’ll take that, too.” Exhausted by the events of the day, they stay on the couch all night wrapped around each other, dozing, listening to the news, and trying not to think about anything beyond the fact that nobody they love has died today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The italicized bits throughout are quotations from actual newscasts on September 11, as the whole thing unfolded in real time. I hope I didn't terrorize anyone unduly with this chapter!


	41. Chapter 41

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Donna and Cameron look up.

They are barely into October when Donna starts talking about hosting an enormous Thanksgiving this year. Cameron is dubious—after everything that’s happened, and with the final decision about the possible sale of MusicLand still looming, she thinks that something small and casual sounds a lot better than a huge mob scene. But Cam can also see that, for whatever reason, planning a big party is important to Donna right now, so she swallows any objections that she has and goes along with it. She knows that Donna still hasn’t fully recovered from the events of September 11, and anything that can help her healing process is more than fine with Cam right now.

Donna has been quiet over the last few weeks, more reflective than sad, Cam thinks. Cameron often finds herself catching Donna’s eye during the day: Donna is looking at her more, touching her more, kissing her more, as if to reassure herself that Cameron is still present and real. Cam certainly doesn’t mind any of this—God knows, she herself had been so terrified that extra contact with Donna right now is more than welcome—but the fact that Donna hasn’t really talked about how she’s feeling is a little concerning. These days, Donna usually has no trouble at all telling Cameron anything and everything, but when she _does_ have trouble, it usually means that she’s hanging onto something particularly weighty. All Cameron can do right now is try to be supportive as whatever this weighty thing might be inches its way to the surface.

The “being supportive” part, right now at least, apparently includes going over the alarmingly increasing Thanksgiving guest list. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to invite _all_ of those people? I mean, where’s everyone going to sit? How are we going to cook for them?” Cameron tries and fails to picture what the house would look like stuffed with everyone that Donna has mentioned.

Donna waves her hand dismissively. “It’ll be fine. If the weather is nice, we can have a lot of it outside. And let’s hire a caterer, so we don’t have to worry about cooking and can just enjoy ourselves.”

But what if the weather _isn’t_ nice? Cam thinks but doesn’t say. “Some of those people are going to have to fly here. That’s asking a lot of them, right now.” Cameron, for instance, is certain that she herself will never want to board a plane ever again.

Donna looks a little uncertain for an instant, and Cameron feels bad about her remark. “Hey, I’m sure it’ll work out. They’ll probably be happy to come. So what’s the guest list looking like?”

Donna gives her a glance that’s a little more openly grateful than Cameron might have expected. “Well, there’s us, and the girls, and Bos and Diane, if they’re not doing anything with their family. Joe, Brian, and Courtney, if they want to come. Katie. Trip and Tanya. My parents . . .” Cameron gives her a sharp look, and Donna shrugs. “It’s Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen them for awhile, and I’d like them to know that they’re welcome here.”

Cam sighs a little, trying to keep it inaudible so Donna won’t notice. At least, if there’s going to be a caterer, her turkey-carving skills (or lack thereof) won’t be on display to disappoint Donna’s father. He’s always seemed to like Cameron more than might have been expected, and Cam doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.

Donna, apparently unaware of Cameron’s inner grumbling, is continuing to discuss the guest list. “What about your mother and Len?”

Cameron stares at her, not certain that she heard correctly. “My mother and Len . . . here? With everyone?” She can’t quite imagine such a thing.

Donna gives her one of those searching looks that seem to be popping up more and more lately. “Cam, look—they’ve never been here, not in the whole six years we’ve been together. You’ve been getting along better with your mother for the last couple of years, and we know that she’s really trying. What’s the harm in asking her to spend the weekend here and see our lives? It might mean a lot to her.”

Shrugging and nodding, Cam lowers her eyes, not quite able to meet the challenge of Donna’s gaze. “Yeah, ok, you’re right. I’ll ask them. I mean, it’ll feel weird to have them here, if they come, but . . .yeah, I’ll do it.” She _has_ been getting along better with her mother, better than probably either of them had ever expected, but the idea of letting her peek directly into her world still makes her anxious, even now.

The warmth of Donna’s smile, however, makes the whole thing feel almost worth it. “So, let’s see . . . how many people is that?”

Cam, who has been mentally counting the prospective guests as Donna lists them, is ready with the answer to that one. “Sixteen, I think, if Courtney counts as a person.”

“So, that’s not so many—we can easily fit into two tables, whether we have it inside or outside. It’ll be fine, and there’s a good chance that not everyone is going to be able to come.” Donna goes over to Cameron and kisses her for no reason at all before turning to squint at one of her many to-do lists, and Cam regards her fondly. It seems that the weirdest things make Donna happy, especially lately.

 

**§§§**

Oddly—terrifyingly, Cameron can’t help thinking to herself—everyone that they invite does eventually accept. Even Bos and Diane, who are going to visit Diane’s daughters the weekend after Thanksgiving and are therefore free for the holiday itself. Even Joe and Brian. Even Donna’s parents. Even (Cam gulps) her mother and Len, who both seem really surprised and pleased at the idea of flying to California for Thanksgiving. So yeah, whatever private misgivings about everything that Cam might be harboring, the Giant, Enormous, Out-of-Control Thanksgiving™ seems to be a go.

Joe calls one afternoon in early November to discuss some of the logistics while Donna is working at Symphonic, and Cameron is glad to talk to him. “Hey. How’s it going?”

“Fine, more or less. Things are starting to feel a little more normal. I guess I don’t really know if that’s good or bad.” Joe’s voice drops a little, and Cam knows that he’s thinking about the kids at his school, four of whom apparently lost parents when the Towers came down.

“It’s good. You can’t do anything about what happened, so normal is good.” It’s not, Cam thinks, as though any of them can prevent “normal” from creeping back into everything. “Normal” is inevitable, whether they want it to be or not.

“Yeah,” Joe says, and Cameron can hear him making a determined effort to shake off whatever melancholy he might be feeling. “But we’re really looking forward to Thanksgiving. We showed Courtney pictures of San Francisco, and she can’t wait to see it.”

Cam wonders just how someone not even two yet expresses that sort of anticipation, but she doesn’t comment on it. Babies will forever remain mysterious creatures to her. “I hope you guys have fun; it’s kind of a long trip for you.”

“We will.” Joe sounds confident. They discuss how long they’ll be in California (a week, because Joe and Brian want to travel around with Courtney to visit some of Brian’s friends) and where they’ll be staying (in a hotel, because with Haley and Joanie home for the holiday there’s no room for anyone else at Donna and Cameron’s house). As always, Cameron loves to listen to the cadence of Joe’s voice; it almost doesn’t matter what he’s actually saying, and it never fails to make her feel more relaxed than she had been when she started out.

All at once, Cam is aware that Joe has asked her a question. “How are you guys doing after everything?”

Cam hesitates a second, thinking about the question. How _are_ they doing? “Ok, sort of. Donna’s been . . . I don’t know, a little off, maybe. We still haven’t really talked about the whole Apple offer, and we need to do that—we have to give them an answer soon. But I guess it just seems sort of weird to be discussing business when the whole outside world is busy falling apart.”

Joe doesn’t answer her for a long beat. “I know what you mean. I was giving a lecture on Thucydides the other day, and it just struck me as ludicrous that I was talking about some ancient Greek guy’s ideas about war when . . . “

Cameron isn’t quite sure who Thucydides is, but she gets the gist of what Joe is saying. “Yeah. But I guess we need to try to do our regular things. I mean, if we don’t, the terrorists kind of win, don’t they?”

Joe responds to that one more quickly. “You’re absolutely right, and we can’t let that happen. As for Donna . . . well, you know how scared she was, how scared you both were that day. Being a little off is a perfectly reasonable reaction.”

Cam nods, knowing that Joe is right. Still, she hopes that Donna will feel like talking to her soon, so they can start to figure out the future together.

 

**§§§**

Fortunately, Thanksgiving dawns bright, clear, and unseasonably warm, which means that the caterers are able to set up tables around the pool. Joanie and Haley had flown in over the weekend, and the rest of the guests will be arriving around noon. The meal itself will apparently be served around 3:00. Cam has always found it strange that holiday meals seem to happen at the exact times of the day when nobody usually thinks of eating.

When Cameron stumbles into the kitchen a little before 10:00, she sees Donna busily talking to a couple of men in white coats who are apparently in charge of the meal. Others are outside, setting up tables and arranging centerpieces. Cam watches the scene bemusedly, thinking of the day (which feels so long ago now) when, intending to say goodbye on her way out of town, she had dropped in on Donna and found herself in the middle of a similar scene of bustling preparations for an event. She hadn’t wanted to leave Donna that day, and fate had thankfully made sure that she never had to.

Donna looks up, smiles, and then moves toward Cameron to give her a hug. “Hey, happy anniversary.”

Cameron grins. “Back at you, Sparky,” says Cameron, feeling the familiar rush of pleasure that always greets her on Thanksgiving morning. She’s amazed that six years have actually passed since Donna decided to give the two of them their shot: Cam can remember every detail of that day so clearly that it seems as though it happened mere weeks ago.

Donna touches Cameron’s cheek. “I know that you probably would rather that we were doing something today with just the girls, but I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

Cam can’t help smiling at her. “Nothing to make up. It’s all good.” Privately, she looks forward to the idea of Donna making something up to her, however she chooses to do it.

Donna is eyeing the caterers now, who are busily setting up another table, one that will presumably contain an array of appetizers when the guests arrive. “Feels weird not to be cutting up rutabagas, doesn’t it?”

Cam grins again. Rutabagas have become her very favorite root vegetable over the years. “Yeah. I hope that they’re at least on the menu.”

“Of course they are. It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without them.” Donna’s smile borders on goofy, and Cam is almost certain that it’s a direct reflection of her own right now.

 

**§§§**

The sight of everyone milling around the yard, laughing and chatting, actually seems more touching to Cameron than she would have thought possible; it’s a cheerful group, and Cam’s initial anxiety lessens as she sees how peculiarly well everything seems to be going. Her mother and Len, who had checked into a nearby hotel last night, seem to be mingling better than Cam had dared hope: Len, perhaps unsurprisingly, is deep in a conversation with Bos about some intricacy of the Texas Rangers that Cameron can’t begin to follow, and her mother is laughing at something that Donna has just said to her. Cam had never actually managed to picture her mother wandering around this place where she and Donna live their lives, but now she realizes that something about it feels more right than wrong. When her mother looks up and smiles at her, Cam feels the sort of warm glow that never fails to catch her off guard.

Feeling a tap on her shoulder, Cam looks up to see Joe moving toward her. “This was a great idea.”

Cam shrugs, giving him a smile. “It was all Donna. She just wanted to get everyone together, after . . . after everything.”

Joe nudges her. “Look at that.” Cam follows his gaze and sees Haley holding Courtney’s hand, helping her walk around the perimeter of the pool. It _is_ cute, she has to admit.

“I didn’t know that she’d gotten so good at walking,” Cam says. The last time she’d seen Courtney, the kid had barely been able to crawl.

Joe looks wistful for a second. “I can already see how fast it’s going to go. I really want to try to enjoy every day of it.”

Cameron touches his arm without saying anything, thinking about how happy she and Joe are now, and how unlikely happiness had seemed for either one of them once upon a time.

 

**§§§**

When everyone is seated at one of the two dinner tables, Donna taps on her glass for everyone’s attention. “I don’t want to hold everyone hostage with a speech, because we all have turkey on our minds right now. But, well . . .”

Everyone laughs, and Cameron, not wanting to let an inappropriate cackle escape, concentrates hard on not looking directly at Joanie and Haley, who are smirking at each other. Donna’s fondness for sentimental speeches has become something of a family joke over the years. Despite that, Cam would never admit to Donna, or to anyone else, just how much she secretly loves those speeches, which always remind her of the night of that Women in Tech party so long ago now, the night that Phoenix had actually been born. Donna is rarely more beautiful to Cameron than she is when she puts her feelings into words for everyone to hear, in a way that Cam herself has never been able to do.

Donna is quiet for a moment before she begins. “I just want to let all of you know how happy Cameron and I are to have you here. We’ve all had our struggles over the last two months, and it sometimes feels as though there’s so much more bad than good in the world right now that we’re never going to be able to restore the balance. But there are also times when I know that isn’t true, and that’s when I think about the people who have become my family over these past nearly twenty years. I love all of you, and I’m grateful that we’re in each other’s lives.” Donna is looking right at Cameron as she’s speaking, and Cam feels a ridiculous lump growing in her throat.

Everyone is silent for a moment, and then, to Cameron’s surprise, it’s her mother who speaks first. “I can’t tell you how thankful I am to be included in your holiday this year. It means . . . everything to me.” The lump is a little bigger, but Cam manages to smile at her before looking away. Maybe Donna was right about this Thanksgiving, maybe it _is_ what all of them need right now. Donna is beaming at both Cameron and at her mother, obviously moved by what she has just heard, and Cam can’t seem to take her eyes off of her: a glowing Donna is just about the best version of Donna of all.

And now, of all people, Trip is standing up and actually raising a glass to everyone, looking uncharacteristically nervous. “Since we’re doing this . . . I just want to say that gatherings like this one have become really important to me, more than I ever thought that they would. It hasn’t always been easy for me to make real friends, and I feel like I finally have them now. With everything that’s happening in the world, I know that our connections with each other are the most important thing that we have. I’m lucky to be here today, and I’m especially lucky to be here with the greatest girlfriend a guy could ever ask for. Tanya, thanks for putting up with me for so long. You’re the best.” He turns and looks right at Tanya, smiling at her as if the rest of the crowd has dematerialized and there is nobody left on earth except for the two of them.

Suddenly, Tanya is saying something that makes Cameron’s mouth hang open. “Marry me.”

Trip looks stunned. “Huh?”

“Marry me. And soon.” She’s half-smiling now, seemingly unaware of the two tables of people staring at the two of them, waiting for Trip to say something.

Trip, for one of the first times since Cameron has known him, literally seems at a loss for words. “But . . . you never wanted to. I mean, every time I’ve asked, you always said that what we have is working, and that we shouldn’t mess that up. Why now? Why do you want to . . .”

“Because we never know when there won’t be a tomorrow, and we need to try to get as much out of today as we can. And because . . . because I just feel like it right now. So how about it? What do you say?” Tanya abruptly seems to notice her audience, a flicker of embarrassment crossing her face. Then she visibly shrugs it off and focuses all of her energy on Trip.

Trip appears to come out of his daze and just grins at her. “What do I say? I say, let’s get busy planning the most awesome wedding anyone here has ever seen.” His cockiness is back, but the softness of his gaze cracks the facade.

Everyone burst into applause. “Hey, now. A little Thanksgiving romance. What’s better than that?” Bos is grinning at everyone, and Diane kisses his cheek. Cameron can’t believe how corny all of this is, and how absurdly right it feels.

Joanie is standing up now, a little hesitantly. “I can’t possibly top that, and I don’t want to try. But I sort of have something pretty great that I want to tell everyone. I just found out that the _Times_ is offering me a real photojournalism job, starting after the holidays. I guess they sort of liked those 9/11 photos that I took.” She’s flushing a little, and Cameron feels a shot of joy: she knows how much that job means to Joanie.She’s not surprised that the _Times_ was impressed—the pictures that Joanie took that day somehow managed to capture the unimaginable, freezing history for everyone to see.

Cameron knows that Donna is crying right now, but she’s doing it subtly enough that most of the others won’t notice. “Honey, that’s so . . . you’re amazing. You know that, right? I’m so proud of you.” Everyone applauds again, and Cameron thinks that she has never seen a group of happier people than the one she’s part of right now. Nothing will ever top the Thanksgiving when Donna said yes, but this one is running a pretty close second.

 

**§§§**

Thanksgiving goes on for most of the weekend, since the out-of-town guests are all staying a few days before heading back to their regular lives. By midday Sunday, everyone (even Joanie and Haley) has departed, and Donna and Cameron are alone for the first time since the holiday began. Without having to discuss it much, they decide to spend the night at the Airstream.

When they arrive, Donna busies herself by starting the campfire, a task she’s gradually adopted as her own over the years. It’s a clear, chilly night, much cooler than it had been on Thanksgiving several days before, and both of them look forward to the warmth of the fire. Donna switches on Cam’s small boombox to a soft rock station as she works. (It’s rare that either of them listen to music on anything other than MusicLand these days, but Donna apparently doesn’t want to bother getting out a laptop.) Cameron watches her for a moment, and then goes inside the Airstream to get something.

When Donna looks up, the fire crackling nicely now, Cam hands her a long, clumsily wrapped package. Donna frowns at it, visibly confused. “What’s this?”

Cam shrugs, feeling a little awkward. “It’s just . . . it’s sort of an anniversary present.”

Donna raises an eyebrow, looking so much like a really beautiful version of Spock that Cam’s heart thuds in her chest. “We don’t usually do anniversary presents.” It’s true that they don’t, because between Thanksgiving and Christmas, extra presents just always seem stressful, and presents have never been the point of the two of them, in any case. But this year seems different. This year, Cam wants to give Donna something that might make her happy.

Cam nods. “Yeah, I know, but I thought that, right now . . . this might be nice. Open it.”

When Donna does, she gasps a little at the small, silver telescope in her hands, complete with a little folded-up tripod. She strokes it in wonderment. “How did you know I always wanted one of these?”

Cameron flushes with pleasure, wondering if Donna remembers that visiting a planetarium had been one of their first dates. “I didn’t, but . . . I always sort of wanted one, too. I always kind of thought that being an astronomer must be . . .”

“. . . beautiful,” Donna smiles. “Yeah, me too. Cam, thank you. This is wonderful.”

They attach the telescope to the tripod and first use it to study the moon, which tonight is clear and full. “Wow, look at how close the craters seem,” Cameron says, squinting into the little scope. “It’s like we’re flying over it right now.” She hands the telescope back to Donna, who looks through it in silence for several long moments. The fire is warming them both all the way through, the music plays softly from the radio, and, watching Donna and gazing at the moon, Cameron thinks that she has never felt quite as perfectly herself as she does right at this moment.

“Hey, Donna?” Cam almost hates to break the spell over them with the sound of her own voice.

“Hmm?” Donna looks at her dreamily, and Cam knows that she’s feeling this magical thing as well right now.

“When everyone was saying stuff at Thanksgiving, I wanted to tell you . . . thanks. Thanks for saying you wanted to try this. Thanks for . . . well, being who you are to me. I . . . I appreciate it.” She knows that she sounds ridiculous right now and so she stops, but she also knows that Donna gets what she means. Donna always gets it. _I love you,_ Cam thinks. _I love you._

Donna looks at her, blinking a little too fast. “You’re welcome. Me, too.” They smile at each other, and Donna hands the telescope back to Cameron. “Let’s try to find Venus now.”

They do, passing the telescope back and forth, both in awe of the sheer beauty of the heavens. Here, right now, even if only temporarily, evil and cruelty and hatred are losing the eternal battle to joy and love and wonderment, and Cameron feels as though her heart is so full of everything good that there’s a genuine danger of it bursting into pieces.

_And now, it’s time for the 1997 Green Day classic[Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)](http://www.heatherweb.com/stuff/fade/time.mp3)_

_Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road_  
_Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go_  
_So make the best of this test, and don't ask why_  
_It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time_  
_It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right  
_ _I hope you had the time of your life._

Cameron lets the lyrics wash through her, marveling both that a punk band like Green Day had softened enough to write this ballad and that a punk-lover like she had always been had softened enough to appreciate it. Suddenly, she hears Donna saying something.

“I know what I want, I just don’t know if it’s what _you_ want.” Donna’s voice is low, and Cameron realizes that she’s talking about the future of Phoenix, the future of _them_ , really.

“Tell me.” Cam reaches over to take Donna’s hand, and Donna squeezes back before responding.

“I want to sell MusicLand outright. I don’t want to work for Apple, and I don’t want to give up Phoenix. I want us to do something new.”

Cam isn’t entirely surprised; even though they had been drifting toward deciding to stick with MusicLand and work for Apple, she had never felt certain about any of it. “So you want us to start over.” She thinks about that, wondering how whatever new idea they end up having will play out.

Donna looks through the telescope without responding at first. When she does, she seems to be shifting the subject. “Do you remember the beginning of Pilgrim?”

Cameron looks at her; of course she remembers. “Sure.”

Donna puts the telescope aside and just gazes up at the stars. “Everyone kept following the same path and getting bounced back to the beginning, but what you needed to do was to . . .”

“. . . look up,” Cam finishes. “You needed to look up.”

“Yeah,” Donna says looking directly at Cameron for the first time since the conversation began. “That’s what I want. I don’t want to start over. I don’t want another version of what we’ve already done. I want us to . . . look up.”

Cameron doesn’t answer, looks at the stars above, and waits for Donna to say more. When Donna does, her words are coming out faster and sounding more sure with every sentence. “I don’t want to start a big company that’s going to lead to an IPO that’s going to end up losing ground to some other big company that will eventually lose ground to something else. I just want to . . . stop.”

Cam is startled. “Do you mean . . . not work?” She honestly can’t imagine such a thing.

“No,” Donna says quickly. “No, not that. I mean, we don’t _have_ to work—between the Apple sale and what we already have from MusicLand, we’re set financially for the rest of our lives. But we’re way too young to retire, and working together is who we are. We can just maybe . . . think differently. Look up. I want it to be small and perfect and _ours_ , something that isn’t ever going to go public. After everything that’s happened, I want something that’s going to put something good out into the world. I want us to do that . . . together, without worrying about stock options and boards of directors and quarterly earnings and competition and everything else. I just want to work on something that we both love, something that might make the world a better place.”

 Cameron thinks about what Donna has just said, and deep down, she knows that it’s what she wants as well, what she’s really wanted for the past year, ever since the appearance of iTunes had made work more a place of anxiety than of joy. “I . . . I want that, too.” _Listen to each other. Make stuff we love. Enjoy the ride. Remember what’s important._ Everything she wants, everything she needs, Cameron realizes, has always been there in that cheesy Phoenix vision statement that Donna had drafted so long ago.

Donna breathes a sigh of what Cameron recognizes as pure relief. “I’m so glad to hear that. We can wait for the right idea to come along. There’s no rush with that, not really. Let’s just take our time and see what happens.”

Cam nods, watching the stars again and letting her mind drift along with the swirling galaxy above. Then all at once, out of nowhere, she suddenly sees it clearly. She has no idea where it comes from, or how it arrives wholly formed in her mind, but there’s no doubt at all that it’s what she wants to be doing next with Donna.

Donna, attuned to Cameron as always, looks at her questioningly. “What?”

“I just . . . I think I know what it should be.” Cameron feels the familiar bolt of excitement rushing through her at the idea of a new project, and she doesn’t bother trying to hide that from Donna.

Donna grins at her, feeling it too. “Well, that was the shortest ‘wait and see’ in history. What are you thinking?”

“Do you remember those self-learning AI bots that I was fooling around with before we started Phoenix, the ones that I showed Alexa and she told me that I wasn’t thinking big enough?” Cam hesitates, picturing that walk in the woods. Even now, even after the mega-success of MusicLand, that remark still stings a little.

Donna nods, watching her. “Sure. I thought it was great, actually. That’s what you want us to do?”

“Sort of. What if instead of it being just a game, we make something that makes it easier for kids who are having problems to, well, _talk_? You know, maybe kids who have lost a parent, or whose parents got divorced, or who have other stuff? They could play a game with the bots kind of to express things that they can’t say out loud, to people who need to hear them.” Cam thinks about how much she bottled up while she was growing up, and how being able to talk through a computer game might have helped her a little.

Donna’s eyes light up. “You mean, something that maybe schools or therapists or psychologists could use?”

Cam nods. “Yeah, something like that. I mean, maybe we could partner with psychology researchers or whoever knows about this stuff.” She’s not exactly sure how it all would work, but they have all the time in the world to figure out the details.

“We can be a nonprofit. Cam, I love this idea. It’s perfect. For someone who never wanted kids, you sure have a lot of great ideas about them.” Donna turns to kiss Cameron, and for a few blissful moments there’s no more talking at all.

Donna pulls away and looks at Cameron thoughtfully. “There’s something else. No, there’s two something elses.”

Cam touches Donna’s hair and smiles. “I can’t wait to hear them. Hit me.”

“I’m going to quit Symphonic so we can just concentrate on this new thing. I . . . it’s time.”

Cameron looks at her, a little shocked. “Really? Are you sure? You love Symphonic.”

Donna nods. “I’m sure. Yes, I did love it, but it’s time for everything to get smaller. I want . . . us. Just us. And there’s something else: I want us to build a house here, something that’s also small and perfect and ours. I want to sell the Mountain View house and live here, with you, in a house that we design together. What do you think?”

Cameron stares at her. “I . . . I never thought you’d want that, not ever. Do you really think you want to sell the house?”

“I do. I want something little and beautiful. I want to walk in the woods with you during the day and look at the stars at night. I want a lot of windows. I want . . . every corny thing that anyone has ever thought of, I want. Hell, I even want a garden.” Donna is laughing now.

“What about chickens?” Cam is grinning back at her.

“Well, let’s not go too crazy. We can always buy eggs from our neighbors, the way you’re doing right now.” That makes sense, Cam thinks. She finds it hard to picture Donna taking care of chickens.

 _So take the photographs, and still-frames in your mind_  
_Hang them on a shelf in good health and good time_  
_Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial_  
_For what it's worth, it was worth all the while_  
_It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right  
__I hope you had the time of your life_.

“Ok, let’s do it.” Cameron moves a little closer, putting her head on Donna’s shoulder. They both watch the fire together and think about the future.

After awhile, Cameron hears herself speaking before she gives any real thought to what she’s about to say. “Hey, Donna . . . I know I don’t say it enough, but I think it all the time. I love you. I love you a lot.”

She closes her eyes and feels Donna’s lips brushing her forehead. “Ditto.” They both laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has yet another overlap with [one of Halt and Catch Fire to the Max's headcanons](http://haltandcatchfiretothemax.tumblr.com/post/170597290846/femslash-february-2018-428-in-which-cameron-and). I'm not surprised about this one, because star-gazing is both geeky and romantic, and not many things are. From the very beginning of this fic, I knew that the penultimate chapter would have Cam and Donna looking through a telescope at the Airstream on their anniversary and deciding to let MusicLand go. I hope you like how it ended up coming out, since it's pretty close to how I imagined it would be.
> 
> So we're close to the end of this thing--just one more chapter and an epilogue to post. The good news for impatient readers (all three of you!) is that I'll be posting both of these at once. The bad news for impatient readers is that I'm not going to be doing that until the morning of Christmas Eve. The last chapter is a Christmas chapter, and I want to get as much sappy bang for the buck as I can. I also find myself a little reluctant to let this thing go, so putting that off for five more weeks sounds right to me. You'll just have to wait until then to see how I
> 
>   ~~end with Cameron getting hit by a bus~~  
>  ~~turn them all into zombies~~  
>  ~~bring Joe back to confess his eternal, undying love to . . . Donna~~  
>  ~~fade to black ambiguously in a restaurant~~  
>  ~~reveal that it was all a dream~~
> 
> Stay tuned!


	42. Chapter 42

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein it concludes in the manner of a Hallmark movie.

**Christmas 1984**

Donna and Gordon argue for a few days about inviting Cameron to Christmas dinner before he grudgingly gives in.

“She’s not going to want to come. She hates the holidays.” Gordon is pulling the boxes of ornaments out of the garage, so he and Donna can decorate the tree that night.

“Well, if she doesn’t, she doesn’t, but I don’t like the idea of her hanging out alone in the Mutiny house with nowhere to go.” It’s been almost a year since Donna started working at Mutiny, and her respect for Cameron has grown with each passing month. Cam can be exasperating, sure, but her passion fuels the company, and Donna feels oddly drawn to her when she doesn’t find her infuriating.

When Donna asks her the next day, Cameron looks startled. “I . . . um . . . I don’t really do Christmas. I was just going to finish up the new chapter of Parallax while it’s quiet around here. All the coders have their own plans.”

“It’s just dinner,” says Donna, shrugging in a too-casual way. “You have to eat, whether it’s a holiday or not.”

In the end, after some more persuasion, Cameron comes, wearing her one pair of jeans without holes in them and a mostly presentable t-shirt. Joanie and Haley are ecstatic to see her.

“Cam! Cam!” The girls grab her hand and pull her toward their room. Cam follows obediently, and the three of them hang out there (doing what, Donna can’t quite imagine, but she also can’t help being moved by how good Cameron seems to be with her daughters, how she, unlike most adults, talks to them as though they’re actual human beings) until dinner is on the table.

Cameron is stiff and awkward, not saying much and eating a little too quickly. Donna watches her, wanting to ask why she isn’t with her own family, whom Donna is pretty sure live close by. She’s usually too busy thinking about Mutiny to wonder about Cameron, yet right now, Donna is suddenly struck by how little she really knows about her partner. But since she’s learned to let Cam reveal things at her own pace, Donna swallows her questions and turns the conversation to the always-safe topic of Mutiny. “How’s that new Parallax chapter coming along?”

Cameron looks up at her, suddenly more animated. “It’s great. I think our users are really going to like it.” Donna listens and murmurs appreciatively in the right places, loving the sound of Cameron’s enthusiasm and grateful that they’re working together. Donna’s old TI job now feels like a long-distant nightmare.

After dessert (a chocolate ganache cake that Donna had bought from a nearby bakery), Cam looks at her almost shyly. “Hey, Donna? Thanks. This was . . . fun.” When Donna’s glance lasts a beat too long, Cameron shrugs, rolls her eyes, and finally smiles a little. It’s not much, but it looks sincere, and Donna’s smile back is broad and unguarded.

 

**Christmas 1986**

Three days before Christmas, and two days after they all learn about Ryan’s suicide, Donna, Joanie, and Haley see Cameron in the grocery store. The girls, who have missed Cam over the months that it’s been since she moved out, explode in her direction. Donna watches their tight embrace hollowly, a witches’ brew of guilt and misery and painful regret burbling inside of her. When Cam glances up, Donna gives her a motionless wave of acknowledgment. Cam lifts her own hand back in a brief moment of connection before turning to leave. Donna doesn’t know that Cameron is about to fly to Tokyo, that they won’t see each other for another four years.

Donna spends that particular Christmas constantly feeling the sting of tears that she can’t let escape, at least not until late at night, after she’s sure that Gordon is asleep. Head and heart full of a grief deeper than any she has ever known before, she barely notices the decorations, the food, or the pleasure of her daughters in their presents. All she has right now is loss: the loss of Mutiny, which is almost certainly in a tailspin after the failed IPO; the loss of her marriage, which she knows is in the sort of trouble from which it might never recover; and, possibly most of all, the loss of Cameron, whom she had betrayed for what turns out to have been no reason at all.

 _Have yourself a merry little Christmas_  
_Make the Yuletide gay_  
_Next year all our troubles  
_ _Will be miles away_

 _Once again as in olden days_  
_Happy golden days of yore_  
_Faithful friends who are dear to us  
_ _Will be near to us, once more_

 _Someday soon we all will be together_  
_If the fates allow_  
_Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow  
_ _So have yourself a merry little Christmas now._

As Donna listens to this particular carol, the tears finally spill over and start to roll down her cheeks. She brushes them away and glances up, glad that Joanie, Haley, and Gordon are too busy assembling one of their many presents to notice her at all.

 

**Christmas 1988**

The package arrives from Tokyo four days before Christmas. When Donna opens it, she finds several awkwardly-wrapped presents (way too much tape, Donna thinks) with gift tags on them for Joanie and Haley. She places them carefully under the tree, wondering what they are, touched in spite of herself at the bonds that Cameron somehow, from so far away, after everything, is maintaining with her daughters.

Donna sits down on the couch, looking at the tree and at Cameron’s presents beneath it. Then, without stopping to think consciously about it, she reaches for the purse that is perched on the little end table beside her and pulls out her address book. Flipping it open to a well-worn page, she studies Cameron’s contact information, which Gordon had provided to her after receiving it in an email. (He had known that Donna would want it, even if she would probably never use it.)

Biting her lip, Donna picks up the phone, starts to dial the “81” that is Japan’s country code, and then abruptly hangs up. What could she possibly say to Cameron? What would Cameron say to her? Donna suddenly fantasizes about what it would be like to fly to Tokyo, find Cameron’s apartment, and knock on the door.

_“Hey.”_

_Cameron’s face is surprised, hostile, but maybe . . . maybe . . . just a tiny bit welcoming._

_“I just wanted to tell you that I made a terrible, terrible mistake, the worst mistake that I’ve ever made in my life. And that working with you at Mutiny was the best thing that ever happened to me. And that I miss you every day. And that I . . . I love you.”_

_Cameron’s face melts, and her eyes soften. “Me, too.” She motions with her chin for Donna to come inside, and Donna enters the apartment._

Donna shakes herself out of this ludicrous daydream, not knowing where it had come from, and hoping that it never makes its way to the surface of her mind again. The idea of any of that ever happening is preposterous. Cameron is part of Donna’s past, nothing more, and her subconscious just needs to accept that and move the hell on.

 

**Christmas 1990**

It’s their first Christmas since the divorce, and Donna had been determined to make it a great one for Joanie and Haley. She and Gordon had agreed that they’d spend the holiday together, to show the girls that their parents are friends, and that, in spite of everything, they’re all still a family. But because of Donna’s abrupt decision to fly to Switzerland and meet with CERN after Cameron forced her out of the browser project, it didn’t work out that way. At that moment, she hadn’t cared about Christmas or her daughters or anything else: all she had wanted in the world was to beat Cameron and Gordon and Joe, to be the one to create the first marketable browser for the World Wide Web. Everything else in her life, every other person in her life, had suddenly become immaterial.

The meetings with CERN go well, but the earliest flight that Donna can get back home is on the day after Christmas. The girls spend the whole holiday alone with Gordon, and Donna doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to make it up to them, or if they’ll ever forgive her for it. She sits on the plane, face pressed against the window, staring blankly at the blackness outside, heart a roil of fury and hate and shame and just about every other ugly emotion that exists. Fuck Cameron for turning her into this person. Shaking it off, Donna picks up a sheaf of spreadsheets and studies them, determined never to think about Cameron Howe ever again.

 

**Christmas 1992**

Since the girls will be at Gordon’s this year on Christmas Day, Donna tries hard to get home early on Christmas Eve to be with them. A few work emergencies conspire against her, however, and it’s almost 7:30 when she actually walks through the door into her living room. She finds Haley watching something on TV and Joanie nowhere to be seen.

“Hi, Bug,” Donna says, tossing her bag on the side table. “Sorry I’m late.” She goes over to give Haley a kiss. Haley looks up at her mother and shrugs without answering.

Donna notices that the lights on their little Christmas tree aren’t on, and she bends down to plug them in as she passes. The room looks a little better once they’re up and running, but Donna can’t kid herself into thinking that anything about this atmosphere feels much like a holiday. She watches as Haley switches off the television, gets up, and starts to rummage around in the refrigerator.

“Hey, it’s Christmas Eve—we can do better than that. I just have to heat up the ham, and I can whip up some mashed potatoes and peas to go with it. It’ll all be ready in less than an hour.” Donna forces her voice into cheerfulness, and she sees Haley nodding a little listlessly.

“That sounds good. I was just sort of hungry now, is all.” Haley closes the refrigerator door and tries to smile at her mother.

Donna sighs, feeling a pang at just how sad Haley looks. “Is your sister in her room?” When Haley nods, Donna goes toward Joanie’s room and taps on the closed door lightly.

“ _Ohairi kudasai._ ” Donna hears Joanie’s voice calling out in fairly confident Japanese. She opens the door and pokes her head in.

“Were you telling me to come in or to go away?” Donna sees that Joanie has on headphones that are attached to her DiscMan.

“That’s ‘please come in.’ The Japanese are very polite.” Joanie’s grin is a genuine contrast to her customary scowl.Practicing her Japanese has become one of her favorite things to do in the evening.

“You’re really getting good.” Donna’s praise of her daughter is automatic, but she can’t help clenchingher jaw a little as she thinks about all the hours that Joanie has spent with those Japanese language CDs from Cameron. ( _Cameron . . ._ )

Joanie seems to sense Donna’s unconscious darkening. “I don’t need to be listening to these now. I was just . . .”

“Joanie, it’s fine. I’m glad you’re learning Japanese. It was nice of Cameron to send those CDs to you.” Donna’s voice is carefully neutral, even though just uttering Cameron’s name requires an effort.

“Mom, you don’t have to . . . I mean, I know you hate her.” Joanie isn’t looking at Donna as she says this.

“I don’t hate her. I . . .” Donna knows that what she’s just said is both true and not true. Hate is certainly one of the things she feels when she thinks about Cameron, but it’s not the only thing. Since she barely comprehends it herself, she can’t explain any of that to Joanie. “Have you heard from her lately?” Donna tries to ask it casually, but she doubts that Joanie is fooled.

Joanie nods. “Got an email the other day. She’s working on a new game. She says maybe she’ll have to come to the States next year to promote it.”

Donna winces a little, wondering what it would be like to see Cameron again, mostly (but not entirely) hoping that she doesn’t ever have to. “That’s good. Hey, are you ready for dinner?” Joanie nods, smiling at her in a way that makes Donna suddenly think that her daughter possibly understands a lot more than might have been expected.

 

**Christmas 1993**

This year the girls are with Gordon for Christmas Eve, and they’ll be with Donna tomorrow.Donna spends the evening reading on the couch in the living room, not wanting to go to sleep until she knows that they’re safely back. It’s close to midnight when Gordon finally drops them off.

“That was really crazy,” Joanie and Haley are laughing at something together as they walk through the door. They stop abruptly when they see Donna.

“Hey, mom,” Haley says, looking a little uncomfortable and guilty.

Puzzled, Donna wonders what could be going on in Haley’s mind right now. “Hi, guys. Did you have fun with your dad?”

Joanie and Haley look at each other, and it’s Joanie who answers. “Yeah. Dad actually took us to dinner at Joe’s apartment. Joe made paella. It was pretty good.”

All at once, Donna gets it; Gordon had mentioned that Cameron and Joe were dating, so Cameron was obviously at the dinner, too. She decides not to comment on her realization. “That sounds nice.”

Both Joanie and Haley look relieved, and Donna wishes that her— _whatever_ —with Cameron weren’t so obvious to the point of awkwardness for everyone. It’s not fair to Joanie and Haley, who have maintained a connection with Cameron for years, but it doesn’t seem as though there’s ever going to be a realistic way to change any of that. Still, however she tries to mask it from her daughters, Donna knows that something about the image of Gordon, Joe, and Cameron—and now, it seems, Haley and Joanie as well—together as a unit makes her realize just how lonely and isolated she’s been feeling. She’s been trying to leave that feeling unacknowledged, but right now, she knows that it’s real, and that it’s probably been getting worse ever since Haley started working at Comet.

Lying in bed that night, squirming uncomfortably at the memory, Donna allows her thoughts to drift toward her encounter with Cameron at the Menlo Internet Strategies Conference soon after Cam returned to California last summer. Why had she bothered to go into Cameron’s session? And once she had, what on earth had possessed her to get up and ask Cameron an aggressive non-question that might as well have shouted out her emotional state to the entire room? What was _wrong_ with her?

Donna suddenly recalls the little impromptu dinner party that she had thrown that night for the Rover team, to make up for biting their heads off after the Cameron debacle. Tanya had given her a review of Cameron’s new game that Trip had found in an advance copy of _Electronic Gaming Monthly_ , and Donna remembers just how devastating it had been: _A meaningless wander-about in a world that never felt complete, devoid of purpose, and lacking in any sense of care for the adoring public waiting to play the game . . . Pilgrim is a ponderous mess. It speaks less to Howe’s creative abilities than to her own narcissism. It’s Howe’s ego-encasing strategy to put any understanding of the game completely out of reach, then blame the user when they are unable to grasp it. . . . What was promised as a visionary game not only doesn’t deliver on any of its supposed charm and intrigue, it waddles beyond comfort into the supernatural world of mystic garble and elitist trash._ Before Donna had time to push her reaction into the Cameron part of her mind holding everything she doesn’t want to think about, she had felt some peculiar combination of sadness and protectiveness washing through her. Far from being happy to see Cam finally fail at something, she had been oddly crushed for her, whether she wanted to have been or not. What sort of sense did _that_ make?

Donna shakes off the memory and tries to sleep. Tomorrow is Christmas, and the last thing that she wants to be thinking about right now is Cameron Howe.

 

**Christmas 1994**

It’s close to dawn when Donna wakes up in the Airstream the day after Christmas, and she can hear from Cameron’s soft breathing that she’s still asleep in the other bed. Donna can just barely make out Cam’s features across the trailer. Cam looks peaceful lying there, much more so than she’d been at any time yesterday during the visit to her mother and Len. Donna sighs, leaning back into her pillow and allowing herself to enjoy the feeling of drowsiness for just a little while longer.

At that moment, Cameron opens her eyes, glances over, and sees that Donna is awake. “Merry It’s-Not-Christmas-Anymore.”

Donna smiles over at her. “You really hate it, don’t you?”

Cam yawns. “I really, really do.” She sits up and runs her fingers through her hair to tame it a little. “I’m sorry again that you had to deal with it. I know that you actually _like_ Christmas.”

Donna hesitates before responding. “Actually . . . I don’t think I’ve had a good Christmas myself in a long time. After the divorce, Gordon and I had to share the kids for the holidays. And even before that . . .” She breaks off, and she sees Cam giving her a sharp glance without saying anything.

Donna clears her throat. “Anyway, this Christmas was . . . it really was the best one that I’ve had in awhile.”

Cam shakes her head, smiling a little. “That . . . is pretty sad.”

Donna shrugs. Maybe so, but she’s feeling anything but sad right now.

Cameron yawns again, stretches, and then flings the blanket off and gets out of bed. “Want to go to Denny’s before we hit the road?”

Donna nods, struck by the image of “the road,” of hours and hours with Cameron, of the beginning of Phoenix at the end of it all. A little shiver of excitement runs through her as she thinks about everything that lies ahead for both of them. She can’t wait to get started.

 

**Christmas 1995**

On the day before Christmas Eve, Donna comes into the living room to see Cameron just staring out the window, apparently lost in thought. Putting their relationship on hold because Donna isn’t yet ready to tell the girls has been rough on both of them, but even rougher on Cam, who clearly is miserable this time of year under the best of circumstances.

Haley and Joanie are out for the whole evening doing some last-minute shopping, so Donna and Cameron are alone for the first time all week. Donna puts her arms around Cam from behind and kisses the back of her neck. “How are you doing?”

Cam turns around to face her, smiling a little wistfully. “I’m . . . hanging in there.” They both laugh.

Donna pulls Cam toward the couch, and Cam follows her obediently. It’s starting to get dark, and soon the lights from the Christmas tree in the corner are the brightest things in the room. Donna watches them blink and puts an arm around Cameron, who nestles a little closer to her, taking a deep breath as she does so. Donna runs her fingers through Cameron’s hair for a few moments before saying anything. “I’m sorry about all of this. It just . . . right now, this is how it has to be.”

Cam sighs. “I know. And Christmas will be over in a couple of days, and then it’ll just be a week until New Years, and then regular life will start again.” Cameron falls silent after that and just stares at the tree without saying anything more.

Donna wonders if Cam finds those lights even the tiniest bit beautiful right now; she thinks she’d do anything to make Cameron feel happy about some part of Christmas, even just a little bit. “I wish you didn’t hate the holidays so much.”

Cam shrugs. “Eh. It’s only a few days a year. It’s no big deal. I’m used to it.”

Donna takes her hand. “I seem to remember that you don’t hate hot chocolate.”

Cam is looking at her now, apparently amused enough to stop feeling gloomy, for the moment at least. “Well, no, I don’t hate hot chocolate.”

“How about if hot chocolate with a candy cane stirrer becomes our brand-new Christmas tradition? Would that work for you? Could that be our one good thing?” Donna is pleased to see that Cameron’s smile looks a little more genuine this time.

“It would work for me fine.” Donna kisses her softly, and for the next few moments neither of them thinks about hot chocolate at all.

 

**Christmas 1996**

Cameron has been talking about her father more and more to Donna since her trip to visit his grave, and for the first time, she tells her what Christmas had been like before he died.

“He was a Christmas nut, completely. He bought presents months in advance and hid them all over the house. I’d try to find them, but I never managed to do it. He was pretty smart about it.” Cam’s expression is a little unfocused, and Donna has never heard her talking about Christmas in quite this way before.

“I always try to buy my presents early, but I’m usually scrambling at the last minute whether I want to be or not.” Donna thinks about how this year especially, she’s been behind on everything. Catching up after the Thanksgiving Florida trip has been more of a challenge than she might have expected.

“There’s one thing that we always did on Christmas Eve morning—it’s going to sound really stupid, and it’s not very Christmas-y.” Cam’s voice is a little embarrassed.

“I guarantee you that I won’t think it’s stupid. What was it?” Donna, happier to hear Cameron telling her these things than she probably ought to be, tries hard to sound offhand.

Cameron hesitates. ‘It was . . . we went to this train museum, in Dallas. He was sort of a train freak, and we’d go together while my mother finished up some last-minute stuff. They were always open in the morning on Christmas Eve, so we’d go, have lunch, and then come back home. It was . . . fun.”

Donna grins at her. “I actually have always loved trains, too. You know, there’s a railway museum in San Francisco. Maybe we should go there on Christmas Eve morning this year. Joanie and Haley will probably be busy with their last-minute stuff, so we could slip away and have lunch. What do you think?”

Cameron stares at her. “You’d have time for that? I mean, aren’t you rushing around finishing up . . . things?”

“Nope, not if I don’t want to be. I think Christmas Eve should be whatever we want. And maybe what we want is trains. Who said we have to be like the other children?” Donna watches Cameron’s face light up a little, and no Christmas present she’ll receive this year could possibly be better than that.

 

**Christmas 1997**

That year, they watch _Santa Claus Conquers the Martians_ and _The Star Wars Holiday Special_ three separate times: first the night before Joanie and Haley come home for the holidays; second while Donna is baking brownies; and third while Donna and the girls are decorating the tree, a ritual that Cameron watches rather than participates in.

“Feel free to join in any time, Cam,” says Donna, struggling under the weight of a second box of ornaments that she’s hauled in from the garage and looking at Cam relaxing on the couch.

“I’m fine right here,” Cameron smirks back at her, watching the movie and eating popcorn. “I like to see others work when I don’t have to. Trees are your thing, not mine.”

Donna shakes her head, glad that at least Cameron is feeling cheerful enough to joke about Christmas.

“Don’t you think you’ve watched that dumb movie enough for one year?” Joanie asks, grimacing at the endless sequence of Wookie language coming from the television.

“Nope,” Cameron answers. “I think I’ve watched it exactly the right number of times.”

Smiling to herself, Donna puts another ornament on the tree and regards it critically. Personally, she thinks that Wookie sounds like the best of all Christmas carols right now.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve,” says Haley, selecting an ornament herself. “What are we going to have for dinner?”

“I don’t know,” Donna says, enjoying watching Haley’s expression. “What are you cooking for all of us?”

Haley makes a face, but surprisingly, Cameron answers. “That’s actually kind of a good idea. Why don’t we each pick one thing to make?”

Donna looks at her sharply. “Huh? What do you mean?” Christmas Eve dinner had always been a big event when Donna was growing up, usually with something fancy, formal, and expensive at the center of it. She had always felt a little harried at having to make two big meals back-to-back, but it had never occurred to her to alter anything.

Cam shrugs. “You know. We can each pick something, even if it’s something nuts, even if what we end up eating doesn’t go together. S’mores. Grilled cheese. Mashed potatoes. Ding-dongs. Whatever.”

Donna hesitates. “You mean, not even assign ourselves salad or dessert or anything at all?” It’s hard to wrap her head around the concept.

“Nope,” Cam is grinning at her now. “What do you say, chief?”

Donna glances at her daughters, who are both nodding, and then she throws up her hands in mock surrender. “I say that you just better not pick your bologna and pickle thing.”

“No promises,” says Cameron, and the flash of love at that moment is palpable.

 

**Christmas 1998**

Because DVDs are becoming more and more popular, Haley comes up with the idea that they each provide a movie to watch on Christmas Eve. “You just can’t pick those Star Wars or Santa Claus and the Martians things,” says Haley. “Other than that, anything is fair game.”

“What do you mean, we can’t pick those? We _love_ those,” Donna is a little insulted at the insertion of this arbitrary rule.

“You’ve seen them a million times, and so have we. You have to branch out.” Haley glances at Joanie for confirmation, and Joanie shrugs and smirks simultaneously.

Cam looks at Donna and smiles. “Don’t worry. We’ll just watch them on our own, before the official movie-watching party starts. They can try, but they can’t keep us from those movies forever.”

Donna smiles back, not wanting to show just how important a tradition those stupid movies have become in her mind. After all, seeing them for the first time had been more or less the beginning of her new life with Cameron.

The Christmas Eve quadruple feature movie party turns out to be a ridiculous amount of fun for all of them. Each of them provides one movie (Donna: _The Cutting Edge_ ; Cameron: _Independence Day_ ; Haley: _Sneakers_ ; and Joanie: _The Year of Living Dangerously_ ) and serves their chosen food-to-share to eat while it plays. It’s after 2:00 AM when they finally finish everything, but Donna doesn’t think she’s ever enjoyed a Christmas Eve quite as much as this one. When Cameron glances up at her, swallowing the last of Joanie’s Indonesian coconut rice balls, she looks so unabashedly happy that Donna can’t help going over to give her a kiss. Tilting her head inquiringly, Cam shrugs and kisses her back.

 

**Christmas 1999**

They’re late picking out the tree this year, and for the first time, Cameron decides to go with them when they do. Donna tries not to look too pleased about it, but she knows she’s not fooling anyone. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Joanie and Haley grinning at each other and Cam looking a little embarrassed.

Donna glares at Joanie and Haley, willing them not tease Cameron about this sudden interest in trees, but Joanie pretends not to notice. “You just better be on my side in our endless discussion about Douglas Fir versus Spruce. I need reinforcements.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “You wouldn’t be so fond of those Spruce trees if you were the one vacuuming up the needles all the time.”

“And besides, the Douglas Fir shows off the ornaments a lot better,” says Haley, getting into the spirit of the debate. Donna listens to her daughters bicker about trees and watches Cameron, who is smiling a little to herself and not saying anything. When they get to the tree farm, Cam looks carefully at all of the options and, to Joanie’s dismay, is ultimately firm in her decision to be part of Team Douglas Fir. Donna thinks that the tree that they select is the most beautiful one they’ve ever had.

As usual, they decorate the tree the day before Christmas Eve. Typically, Cameron watches them from the safety of the couch, sometimes reading, sometimes listening to music, and sometimes insisting that the perfect backdrop for tree-decorating is _The Star Wars Holiday Special_ and _Santa Claus Conquers the Martians._ This year, before any of that can happen, Donna watches Haley handing a package to Cameron. “Early Christmas present,” she says, shrugging. “Open it.”

When Cameron does, she holds up several Hallmark Star Trek ornaments: a tiny model of the _Enterprise_ , a stern-looking Spock, and (amazing, embarrassingly, is this a coincidence or does Haley know something . . . ) a little, perfect replica of Dr. Beverly Crusher. Cam, staring at everything, looks slightly shell-shocked.

“I just figured . . . Joanie and I have ornaments that Mom and Dad gave us when we were kids, and we hang them on the tree every year. I thought that maybe . . . if you had ornaments too, you’d be, like, more interested in the tree.” Haley is flushing and not looking at Cam, and Donna feels a lump in her throat. Cam looks ready to cry herself, but she goes to Haley and gives her a hug. “Thanks. They’re perfect.”

Cameron joins in the tree-decorating process that year as though she’s always done it, and it actually feels as though she always has. The new Star Trek ornaments are given a prominent spot on the tree, and they look beautiful there to Donna.

 

**Christmas 2000**

Although Cameron has been cooking fairly elaborate dishes for them for years, baking has never been her thing. This Christmas, however, she decides to tackle Christmas cookies.

“I want to make the classic kind, the ones that you roll out and put sprinkles on,” Cam says to Donna, who listens bemusedly. Cameron Howe making Christmas cookies is one of the last things that she ever would have thought that she’d see.

Cameron spends a full day on the project, making and rolling out the dough, and then cutting out shapes with the little Christmas cookie-cutters that she purchased from Amazon. The house smells delicious while they’re baking, and Donna has to admit that the final result is worth the effort that Cam put into them.

“These are pretty great,” Donna tells Cameron, who shrugs.

“Yeah, they’re ok.” Cam takes a bite out of one, clearly enjoying it.

“So what would you think if we ate cookies for dinner and watched really bad Christmas movies?” Joanie and Haley are out for the evening, and Donna can’t think of anything she’d rather do at the moment more than this.

Cameron looks a little wary. “What sort of bad Christmas movies do you have in mind?”

They finally settle down to a Hallmark double feature of _The Christmas Secret_ (A scientist sets out to prove that reindeer can fly, and along the way discovers the true meaning of faith, family, and Christmas) and _A Holiday Romance_ (A high school administrator comes to town to close down the school and falls for the charming school music teacher). Cameron seems fascinated by the level of “bad” of these films. “Wow. These are terrible.”

“Yep,” Donna says, reaching for another cookie in satisfaction. “Aren’t they perfect?”

Cam grins, shakes her head, and leans over to kiss her in response. Watching terrible movies together, after all, has always been one of their shared delights.

 

**Christmas 2001**

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Donna wakes up early and finds that, surprisingly, Cameron is already awake and looking at her. “Hey,” Donna says, yawning a little. “Good morning.”

“Back at you,” Cam says, rolling over on her back. She’s apparently deciding whether or not to go back to sleep.

Donna nudges her. “We probably should get up. Lots to do today, and we want to get to the railway museum early.”

Cam grins at her. “What, to beat the crowds?”

“Exactly.” They both laugh.

 

**§§§**

This year, Joanie and Haley both decide to go with them to the museum. “Of all of your weird Christmas traditions, this has to be your very weirdest one.” Joanie is grumbling, as usual, but Donna doesn’t point out the obvious rejoinder that it had been her choice to come with them at all.

Donna has come to love their morning-of-Christmas Eve trips to the railway museum. They usually have the place pretty much to themselves, and something about looking at these machines from another era feels both inspiring and soothing. This year, there’s a new exhibit of trolley cars from the 1910s, all meticulously and expertly restored

“I have to admit, this is kind of amazing,” says Haley, looking at the trolley cars. “They even let you go into the engineering section. I kind of always wanted to do that when we rode the trolley in real life.”

“Everyone wanted to do that,” says Joanie, smiling a little. “It wasn’t just nerds like you.”

After spending a couple of hours looking at the trains and cable cars, they decide to have lunch in a nearby diner that they all like. Watching Cameron and the girls laughing and arguing about what to order from the colorful menus with a suspiciously large number of choices (can any single dish be any good if there are fifty things available?), Donna is nearly overcome with the love she feels for this family of hers. With everything that’s happened in the world, she feels that she’s somehow managed to win the lottery.

 

**§§§**

Since last year’s Christmas cookies had been a hit, Cameron decides to make another batch for their Christmas Eve movie night. “This won’t count as my food that I’m making for everyone. It’s just an extra.”

Donna shakes her head, smiling. “Very generous and ambitious of you.”

Since Joanie and Haley stayed in San Francisco after lunch to do some more shopping, Donna and Cameron put on _The Star Wars Holiday Special_ so they can watch it in peace without the girls’ constant mocking. Donna sits down at the dining room table to wrap some presents and keep Cameron company while she bakes.

Cameron comes into the living room to watch a few scenes of the movie while the oven is preheating. “You know, this movie is underrated. I’m starting to think that it has hidden depths.”

Donna snorts. “Those depths are very, very well hidden.”

They watch in silence for a few moments before Cameron speaks again. “That Christmas Eve in Florida, when we saw this movie in a theater . . . I loved that day. You coming there was just . . . amazing. I couldn’t believe you did that.” Cam is looking at the screen rather than at Donna, but Donna feels the full force of the emotion behind the words nonetheless.

“I guess . . . I just felt like it was something that I was supposed to be doing. I remember telling Diane before I left that I was trying to follow my instincts more. I’m glad I did.” It’s such an understatement that it seems foolish to utter it at all, but then Donna feels Cameron’s hand in hers, and she squeezes back. They stay like that, watching the movie together, until the oven buzzer announces that it’s time for it to receive the first batch of cookies.

 

**§§§**

Donna plugs in the Christmas tree lights just as it’s starting to get dark, and she makes hot chocolate with candy cane stirrers for all of them as they sit and marvel at the tree and the colorfully wrapped presents beneath it. It’s such a quiet, quintessentially Christmas sort of moment that Donna almost feels as though it’s been carefully choreographed by a mysterious holiday fairy.

For the past three years, Haley has adopted the tradition of giving Cameron new Star Trek ornaments on the night that they decorate the tree. This year’s gift had been a Borg cube, and Donna enjoys how it looks nestled next to the traditional red and gold globe ornaments. She glances at Cameron, who smiles back at her. “Pretty cool tree this year.”

“The best ever.” Donna knows that she tends to say this every year, but this time she really believes that it might, in fact, actually be the best tree they’ve ever had. They all munch Cameron’s cookies, sip their hot chocolate, and watch the lights glowing brighter as dusk fades into darkness.

Eventually, Joanie breaks the spell over all of them. “I think it’s time to get started on the movies and food. Who gets to go first?” They argue about that for awhile, ultimately deciding to do it in age order from youngest to oldest this year. Haley’s food is Blueberry Pop Tarts (“Hey, at least I’m toasting them!”) and her movie is _War Games_. (“It might be about war, but it has a happy ending, and we can use that right now.”). Donna hasn’t seen the movie in years, and she enjoys it thoroughly. She and Cam both chuckle at the ancient, 1983-style modems, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief at the resonance of the last lines: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”

Joanie, who generally chooses foreign movies, with food to match, has selected _The Beach_ and, since it’s set in Thailand, offers them takeout Pad Thai from the best Thai restaurant in town. Joanie looks at Haley smugly. “You have to admit that this is a lot better than Pop Tarts, punk.”

Haley rolls her eyes back. “At least I had to put mine into the toaster. You just bought yours.” She digs in as enthusiastically as the rest of them, however, and settles back to watch the movie.

It’s after 10:00 when it’s Cam’s turn, but all of them are still full of energy and eager to see what’s coming next. Cameron looks a little embarrassed when she pulls out her DVD copy of _Miracle on 34th Street._ “I just never watched these old Christmas movies, and I figured now was as good a time as any to start.” Joanie and Haley hoot, but Donna, feeling something warm splash through her, glances at Cameron sharply and doesn’t comment. 

Cameron goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a tray of sushi. “No theme with the movie, obviously. I just felt like sushi tonight, and I read somewhere that fish is traditional on Christmas Eve.” Donna helps herself to some salmon and smiles at Cam, who shrugs, takes a piece of tuna, and gives a lopsided grin back. Haley pops the movie into the DVD player, and they all settle down to watch the story of a department store Santa claiming to be the real Santa Claus.

“This is a lot better than I remember,” says Joanie, as the final courtroom scene starts to play. Donna thinks it’s outright wonderful, and she’s still amazed that Cameron picked it at all, instead of her usual sci fi or horror films. Cam smiles slightly, watches the end of the movie, and doesn’t respond.

“Are we sure we’re all awake enough for one more?” Donna looks around at the others, trying to gauge how sleepy everyone is. It’s just after midnight, after all, and it’s been a busy day.

“No way are you getting out of serving us your food,” Cam says, grinning. “We’re all fine.” Haley and Joanie nod in agreement, and Donna pulls out her movie: _Thelma and Louise_. Cameron laughs out loud.

Donna’s food turns out to be a bowl of fun-size Halloween candy. When Cameron looks at her quizzically, Donna just shrugs. “It’s subversive, like Thelma and Louise, and I figured everyone would be full by now and we can take as much or as little as we like. Plus, I know that you all love candy.” This logic appears unassailable, and everyone selects several pieces of chocolate before the movie begins. When it ends, Donna looks up and sees that both Haley and Joanie have fallen asleep, but that Cameron is wide awake and looking at Donna with a peculiar intensity. As the credits roll, their eyes meet in one of those moments of pure connection that happen regularly but that Donna never manages to take for granted.

 

**§§§**

That night, for the first time in years, Donna feels Gordon next to her after she’s fallen asleep.

_“Remember that Christmas after we went to Comdex with Joe and Cameron?”_

_Donna glances over, but his image is blurry. “You mean, the one when you slept on the couch for a weekbecause you were mad that I kissed Hunt?”_

_“That’s the one. I was kind of an idiot, wasn’t I?”_

_“Just a little bit. But we forgave each other.” Donna feels the particular emotion that she reserves specifically for Gordon, the one that she hasn’t experienced for a long, long time, washing through her,_

_“We had some pretty good Christmases, didn’t we?” Gordon’s voice is wistful._

_“We really did. I wish . . . I wish we could have had more.” This might be a dream, but Donna’s sudden wave of melancholy feels very real right now._

_“But you’re happy now, aren’t you? Cameron makes you happy.” Gordon says it more as a statement than a question._

_“I’m . . . I’m really happy. Everything is . . .” Donna wants to say “perfect,” but she’s learned to mistrust the word._

_“I know it is. There’s nothing I wanted more for you than this.”_

_“Gordon . . . “ Donna hesitates, and then continues. “I really miss you, even so.”_

_“I’ll be around, every now and then. Merry Christmas, Donna.” Gordon’s voice is fading away, and the last word is merely a whisper inside her head._

_“Merry Christmas, Gordon.”_

Donna, heart flooding with peace, sleeps deeply for the remainder of the night.

 

**§§§**

The next morning, Donna opens her eyes to that unmistakable, intangible feeling that she almost always experiences on Christmas morning, even though during the rest of the year she’s an adult who knows perfectly well that holiday magic doesn’t really exist. Glancing over,she sees that Cameron is already awake and yawning. Donna smiles at her a little sleepily, nestling her head into Cam’s chest. “Hey, you. Merry Christmas.”

“Did you ever think about how weird it is that people in England say ‘Happy Christmas,’ and people in the US say ‘Merry Christmas,’ when ‘merry’ is a lot more British-sounding a word than ‘happy’?” Cam looks as though she’s been pondering this for awhile.

Donna kisses her. “No, I can’t say that I’ve ever considered that. Why are you thinking about it right now?”

“Harry Potter.” Cameron has become mildly obsessed with the books, as has Haley: the two of them write long emails to each other spinning theories about the possible content of the upcoming fifth novel, and they’ve recently started delving into fan fiction as they impatiently await its publication date. Donna has read the books, more to be supportive of Cam than anything else; they’re fine, but she really doesn’t get what all the fuss is about. And she definitely doesn’t understand fan fiction—are there really people out there who have so much spare time that they can fritter it away writing and reading about fictional characters?

“Ah.” Donna pushes some hair off of Cam’s forehead, and Cameron curls a little closer to her. They lie like that for awhile, Donna’s thoughts drifting toward the fact that she and Cameron will be signing the papers to transfer ownership of MusicLand to Apple in just three weeks. She suddenly remembers that night, so long ago now, when Phoenix was first conceived: _And soon enough, the decision got made for us. And we walked away friends._ Donna looks at Cameron lying next to her, and her eyes well.

“What?” Cameron apparently notices the change in Donna’s expression.

“Nothing. I was just . . . glad that something didn’t happen.” Cameron nods, not asking Donna what she means.

“Do you remember the night that you first asked me to work with you again, when I gave the speech at that party?” For some reason, Donna is caught in nostalgia right now.

“When I fell into the pool? Yeah, I’m not likely to forget that.” Cameron’s half-smile is crookedly rueful.

“Right. I remember telling Diane that night that your gift is thinking up impossible things.” Donna stops for a moment, lost in thought, and then she continues. “Thanks for . . . thinking up this particular impossible thing.”

Cam looks at her. “Us, you mean? It turns out that it wasn’t impossible. It was just . . . improbable.” She kisses Donna, who laughs.

“Yeah. It certainly was that.” They’re quiet after that, and then Donna speaks again. “I like who I am when I’m with you.”

Cameron’s eyes soften. “Well, I like who you are when you’re with me, too.”

Donna doesn’t say anything, touches Cam’s cheek, and suddenly starts to hum. Cameron jerks her head up to stare at her.

“Is that ['Daydream Believer'](http://www.heatherweb.com/stuff/fade/daydream.mp3)? You’re humming something by The Monkees on Christmas morning?” Cam is shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Donna ignores that and keeps humming, hearing the lyrics in her head as she does:

 _Oh, I could hide 'neath the wings_  
_Of the bluebird as she sings_  
_The six-o'clock alarm would never ring_  
_But six rings and I rise_  
_Wipe the sleep out of my eyes  
_ _The shaving razor's cold and it stings._

 _Cheer up sleepy Jean_  
_Oh, what can it mean to a_  
_Daydream believer and a  
_ _Homecoming queen?_

 _You once thought of me_  
_As a white knight on his steed_  
_Now you know how happy I can be_  
_Oh, our good time starts and ends_  
_Without all I want to spend  
_ _But how much, baby, do we really need?_

Cameron has apparently been silently hearing the lyrics as well. “So who are you? Are you the daydream believer, or are you the homecoming queen?”

Donna twists to look at her. “What do you mean? Sleepy Jean is the daydream believer _and_ the homecoming queen. She’s both.”

Cam frowns. “No way. I think the singer is the daydream believer and Jean is the homecoming queen.”

“That’s crazy!” Donna has never thought about the song this way at all.

“Just listen to it. It really doesn’t make sense to have Jean be both things.” Cam sounds as though she’s prepared to argue about this all morning.

“Cam, you’re ruining what could have been a nice, romantic moment.” She narrows her eyes at Cam, who smirks back at her.

“You’re not going to make ‘Daydream Believer’ one of our songs, are you?” Cam looks horrified at the very thought of it.

“You never know. It might fit nicely into our oeuvre, along with ‘Fade Into You,’ ‘A Whole New World,’ and ‘We Belong.’” Donna is smiling now.

Cam looks at her. “What do you mean, ‘We Belong’? How is that one of our songs?”

Donna flushes slightly. “I’ll tell you later.”She starts humming again, and Cam buries her head under the pillow. After awhile, she peeks out again.

“Hey, Donna?”

“Yeah?”

“I, um, I kind of like Christmas now.” Cam’s voice is a little shy.

Donna, throat tightening, stares at Cam. ( _Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry._ ) Swallowing hard, she touches Cameron’s cheek and kisses her softly. “Ok. The moment is officially back.” Cameron puts her head on Donna’s collar bone, and Donna strokes Cam’s hair.

Finally Cameron speaks. “So, don’t we have a Christmas breakfast or something? I think Joanie and Haley are probably ready to eat the house down by now, even after everything we had last night. And I _might_ have a present or two for you.”

“We do, but let’s wait a minute before getting up. It’s good right now, right here.” And it’s more than good; it’s perfect, so perfect that Donna finally allows herself to think the word without flinching.

Cameron nods, closes her eyes, and takes Donna’s hand. And so they pause time for just a moment in the thing that they created, before moving forward together into whatever is yet to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, um . . . yeah. (Awkward beat) That's it! That is, all but the epilogue. Go read that, and then we'll talk more.


	43. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein we find out more.

And they all lived happily ever after, or at least, they have so far.

MusicLand was sold in early 2002. As part of the sale, Donna and Cameron arranged for Apple to extend job offers to all Phoenix employees. Nearly all of the coders accepted, as ultimately (after some agonizing) did Tanya. She quickly rose to the position of online music vice president, overseeing the integration of MusicLand into iTunes. Tanya is currently the Senior Product Manager at Apple, one of the company’s highest-paid positions.

As she had told Cameron she would, Donna resigned from Symphonic in 2002. That decision proved fortuitous, because by mid-2003, along with about half of the VC firms that had been healthy and active before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Symphonic was forced to close its doors. Luckily for Trip, Tanya’s lucrative job at Apple allowed him the time to earn a teaching certificate for music education. He’s been happily working at a public middle school in the Bay Area for the past fifteen years, teaching music during the day and rocking out with his marginally talented middle-aged band at night. In 2006, Tanya and Trip had a son, whom they named Barnabas Reese-Kisker because Tanya flatly and categorically refused to have a son named Colton Marshall Kisker the Fourth. Barney currently divides his time among playing Fortnite, drawing his own comic book, and showing more aptitude for the guitar than his father ever did.

After working with psychology researchers who had an interest in the emerging idea of [gaming therapy](http://www.electronicgamingtherapy.com/egt.html), Phoenix launched GameHelp in December 2003. As both Donna and Cameron wished, the company stayed small—Donna, Cameron, and two coders have been Phoenix’s only fulltime employees since the sale of MusicLand. GameHelp, however, quickly rose to fill a niche not occupied by any other product, soon becoming the industry standard for child psychologists and school guidance counselors wanting to use video gaming as a therapy technique. As Cameron had envisioned, GameHelp allows children and teenagers (including those on the autism spectrum) who have difficulty talking about their problems to communicate with adults in a safe setting. Donna and Cameron have more ideas for future iterations of GameHelp than they’ll ever be able to implement, but that’s exactly the way they both like it.

In 2004, Donna and Cameron began to design and build a new house on Cameron’s land. Ultimately, they created a small, modern timber home for the two of them, and they also converted an old grain silo to serve both as their star-watching tower and a guest house for visits from Joanie and Haley. These houses look something like this:

The new house, of course, also includes a large pool, since Donna still likes to solve every problem she has by swimming laps for hours on end. Although these problems are fewer and farther between than they have been in the past, Donna still wants to have a pool there when she needs it. Cameron has always been Not a Swimming Person ever since she made such a splash at Donna’s 1994 Women in Tech party, but Donna still hopes that one of these days Cam will get over that and realize just how soothing swimming can be.

(They kept the Airstream, which serves as an auxiliary guest room and an additional office. They both agree that they’ll never sell the Airstream.)

After graduating from ITP, Haley moved to LA to start her career as a CGI animator. In 2003, she was hired to work on _The Incredibles_. To her shock, her former high school girlfriend Jordan was also working on the movie as a PA. The two of them had drifted out of touch when they graduated from college, but after a few awkward conversations, they were both glad to rekindle their friendship as they confronted the formidable challenges of adulting in the entertainment industry. After awhile, the friendship morphed back into a relationship, and they moved in together after the release of _The Incredibles_ in November 2004. They were married in June 2008, when the state of California first began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In 2012, they adopted twin infant girls, whom they named Jodie and Hannah. Jordan has become a successful director, mostly of small, offbeat indie movies, and Haley is in the process of creating her own animated film for Pixar. In addition to Jodie and Hannah, they have a basset hound (Cordelia) and a Siamese cat (Kaiku).

Speaking of same-sex marriage in California, that’s something that Donna and Cameron have talked about a lot, and they continue to discuss it with no clear resolution in sight. On the one hand, they both wholeheartedly approve of the concept, and they want to support it in any way possible. On the other hand, they both feel that what they currently have is in many ways so much _more_ than what they had in their failed marriages that they find themselves reluctant to give it the same designation. They’ve been talking about marriage for the past ten years without really deciding what they want to do, and they’ll probably keep talking about it for a good while longer. In the meantime, they both wear rings for the practical purpose of keeping other people from hitting on either one of them.

Joe and Brian, who are in many ways more traditional than Donna and Cameron, were married in 2011, when same-sex marriage became legal in the state of New York. They enjoy a relatively quiet life, which, all things considered, suits Joe just fine: they both teach at The Hanson Academy, and the most important thing in their lives, besides each other, is Courtney, who is now in her sophomore year at Swarthmore, double-majoring in literature and philosophy with a particular interest in Homer and the pre-Socratics. Joe and Cameron have remained good friends and confidantes, and Courtney has become especially close to Joanie, visiting her in New York whenever she has the chance.

And speaking of Joanie, her career at _The New York Times_ took off like gangbusters. Between 2002 and 2005 she served as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan, taking photographs of the war and causing both Donna and Cameron (and Haley as well) endless worries between bouts of pride in what she was accomplishing. In 2006, Joanie was promoted to assistant international correspondent and based in London, a promotion for which Donna was infinitely grateful—London might be far from San Francisco, but it’s also a whole lot safer than Afghanistan. In 2010, Joanie moved to New York to serve as the _Times_ ’s deputy managing editor of the News division, which pleased Donna even more. As far as her social life goes, Joanie came out to her family in 2003 as an asexual aromantic. Donna, who was completely unfamiliar with asexuality and half-convinced that it must be the result of some trauma caused by the divorce and Gordon’s death, was a little freaked out about it; it had, for obvious reasons, been much easier for her to accept the idea that Haley is a lesbian than the fact that Joanie apparently has no interest in sexual relationships of any kind at all. Joanie patiently gave all of them information about asexuality and explained that it is a natural variation affecting about one percent of the population and not a sign that she is broken in any way. Donna supports her, even though she still doesn’t really get it and continues to worry about Joanie’s happiness. Cameron doesn’t exactly understand it either, but she’s less worried than Donna is, because she can tell that, between her work and her friends, Joanie is having an excellent life, even if it’s not a traditional one.

Katie continues to work at Wikipedia and live in San Francisco, which proved a handy location when the newly-formed Wikimedia Foundation moved there in 2003 from St. Petersburg, Florida. She currently serves as the company’s Chief Product Manager in charge of user research and experience design. Katie has dated off and on over the years, but so far nothing serious has emerged. She also has gotten more interested in politics, canvassing for the Democrats at election time and focusing her efforts on public education and voter registration.

Bos is now 88 years old, still doing well, still enjoying life with Diane, and still waiting for those jet packs and robot overlords to reveal themselves. Diane’s daughters Kimberly and Jennifer have become, respectively, a public defender and a fashion consultant, both happily married (Kimberly for the second time) with children. Bos’s grandson Sam is a junior advertising executive in a midsize Dallas firm, currently single but still hopeful.

Around 2008, Cameron became fascinated by the TV show _Survivor_ , so much so that she flirted with the idea of sending in a video audition tape to the casting people. Donna, however, convinced Cam that even though she'd rock any fire-building challenge. she’d almost certainly be one of the first people voted off the island: social skills are not normally her forte, and she is also secretly too nice to plot and scheme. Grudgingly (after pleasantly fantasizing about how well _Donna_ would plot and scheme on _Survivor_ ), Cameron agreed, but only after convincing Donna that the two of them should send in an audition tape for _The Amazing Race_ instead. Donna gave in, primarily because she was sure that they didn’t have a chance of being selected. Amazingly (see what I did there?), however, they were, and in 2010 the two of them raced around the world in _The Amazing Race 17_. They initially did pretty well, only to fall apart completely in the fifth leg of the race after being U-Turned by an annoyingly smug team of male ice dancers and forced to compete in an extra road block involving sheep, pigs, goats, and large bales of hay needing to be toted through the mud. Donna tried valiantly, but in the end, they were the last team to arrive at the pit stop in New Zealand and were eliminated. Like so many other things that they have done together over the years, it was a failure, it was glorious, it was a disaster, and they loved every minute of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Delivering an Academy Awards-esque speech here is dumb, pretentious, and runs the danger of vastly inflating my own importance. Yet I really do feel emotional about finishing this fic, because I’ve never written anything this long before, and because the writing process has been so important to me over the past year. I’m grateful to those of you who have stuck with this thing from the beginning and who regularly left me encouraging comments; it meant a lot, more than I ever would have thought possible. (I told myself at the inception of this project that there was a pretty good chance that nobody would read it at all and that I’d just have to reconcile to the idea of writing for myself. The fact that some people did read it was unexpectedly wonderful.) I’m happy that there are people out there who care about Donna and Cameron as much as I do, and I care about them a lot. (If some of you for some reason have picked up this fic without ever having watched Halt—go watch Halt. It’s streaming on Netflix, and it’s unbelievably, incandescently terrific. We’re lucky to have it in the universe.)
> 
> I’m not going to abandon Donna/Cameron fics entirely: I plan to write occasional one-shots (I’ll yoke them as a series) to fill out the years between 1997 and 2001. I want to do a Halt/The Americans crossover that almost certainly nobody will read. I have some ambitious meta essays planned that will contain both clips from the show and bits of deleted scenes and action lines from the shooting scripts. I have, however, no desire to write about Donna and Cameron beyond 2001: I don’t want to think about them driving each other to colonoscopy appointments, watching the rise of social media (which in so many ways is the antithesis of the creativity and hope of the early Internet that they helped create), and having to face Donald Trump. I want to keep them firmly in the twentieth century, when, frankly, everything was better. But I’ll read any Donna/Cameron that anyone cares to write, so if any of you are interested in those later years, please have at it!
> 
> For those who like multimedia tie-ins, I’ve created a [Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3VDMZZxbmrLg4oaqrjOZsv) of every song mentioned in this fic. It’s an eclectic list!
> 
> At any rate, I hope you all have wonderful holidays, and thanks again for being such great readers!


End file.
